Impact plus 0 hours, 4 minutes

He woke to darkness, broken by the fizzling sound and leaping blue sparks of torn electrical wires. Somewhere, something was burning -- he choked on the smoke, but couldn't see flames. There were people around him in the dark; he could hear moans, cries, soft voices in a hush of panic.

For a minute he didn't know where he was or how he got here. He thought maybe a bomb had gone off. He'd been in the Middle East, been in Bosnia. This was very like the aftermath of an IED. Then he began to remember, and a shudder went through him, leaving him wrung out and aching. He couldn't believe any of them were still alive.

After a moment's panic when he found he couldn't move his legs, he realized that something heavy was on top of him, pinning him down. Further investigation proved that the heavy thing was one of his people; he touched a jacket-clad arm, but couldn't tell who it was, or even if he or she was alive.

Sitting up, he caught the unknown person's head under his hand and felt a military buzz cut. He thought it might be Sgt. Barrett; the young technician's station was near his own. Touching the throat, he felt a strong pulse and breathed out slowly in relief, lowering the young man gently to the floor and sliding his legs free.

When he tried to stand, a wave of dizziness made him clutch for a hard object which proved to be the edge of his command chair. He used it to lever himself upright, and discovered that at least part of his disorientation was due to the Daedalus's deck listing about fifteen degrees towards the back of the ship. Wherever they were, they hadn't fetched up level.

He still couldn't believe they were alive -- he remembered too vividly how the planet's surface had swooped towards them in the viewscreen, in an instant leaping from a small bright ball to a blue and white quilt of clouds filling the screens; remembered Barrett screaming that they were going much too fast, Hermiod's calm voice over the ship's intercom saying that he was going to try to dump inertia in the ship's atmosphere; remembered turning to look at Weir -- she'd been on the bridge, standing behind his chair -- and seeing the planet's swirling surface reflected in her wide, frightened eyes. And then it was all gone in a jumble of noise and violent motion. He couldn't put the pieces together. He touched his forehead and brought his hand away wet. Concussion, maybe.

But he could stand, and right now, he needed to figure out how bad their situation was. "I need a report," he said loudly, pitching his voice above the soft moans and frightened whispers. "And if anyone has a flashlight, let's get a look around."

"Colonel Caldwell, thank God, sir." He recognized the fervent voice as belonging to Major Perry, his executive officer. A moment later, several flashlights snapped on throughout the room, illuminating a haze of smoke hanging in the air. The bridge did, indeed, look as if a bomb had gone off. Various members of the crew were picking themselves up or leaning on each other as they struggled out from under the debris. Someone was crying softly; he heard another voice, trying to soothe, and heard the weeping person say, "I think my leg's gone."

"Power's totally out, sir," Perry reported from one of the consoles.

Caldwell's radio crackled. "Bridge, this is Engineering. Is anyone alive up there?" It sounded like Novak, although her voice was harsh and rasping, and she broke off in a coughing fit.

"This is Caldwell. We're still getting things sorted out up here. How is it on your end?"

There was a hesitation. "Not so good, sir," Novak said. "We've got fires down here -- we're trying to get them out, but we have no power at all, no lights, and we're having trouble finding the fire extinguishers. Everything's turned upside down."

In the background, Caldwell could hear rapid, raised voices, including the unmistakable, strident tones of Dr. McKay -- complaining about someone's ineptitude, from the sound of things. Obviously he hadn't been injured in the crash, at least not too badly. "Casualties?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. Lots of injuries, at least two dead, I think." In the background, Caldwell heard McKay say, "Where has that lazy Czech gotten off to --" and then breaking off, in a voice of pure horror, "Oh shit, Radek!"

"We could use some medical help down here, sir," Novak added. "I have to go --"

"I'll try to raise the sickbay, and also see if I can get someone down there to help you with the fires."

"Thank you, sir." Novak signed off, but not before Caldwell heard McKay speaking again in the background, in a low, broken-sounding voice, and he realized that he didn't want to know if the soft-spoken Czech scientist was one of the two dead people Novak had mentioned.

It should have been so simple. Just a short hop through the Pegasus Galaxy, escorting some of the physicists to take readings from a couple of nebulas in the hopes of finding a new way to track Wraith ships in hyperspace. McKay had a theory about energy trails in interstellar dust clouds -- Caldwell didn't understand it, hadn't really paid attention to the explanation, but the important thing was that they might have a new weapon to use in the war, and he'd readily agreed when Elizabeth had asked for his help. And when Elizabeth herself wanted to come along ... well, what was one more civilian added to the bunch? It was a 12-hour round trip, they'd hardly be gone long enough for her seat to get cold back in Atlantis, and if Elizabeth Weir wanted to see a nebula up close with her own eyes, why not.

He remembered the look of her eyes in the light from the screens as they dove into the planet's gravity well ... remembered the calm terror on her face. Wondered how many civilians they'd lost on this "simple" trip, how many of his people they'd lost.

"Sickbay, this is Caldwell. Report."

"Ling here," came the brisk voice of his CMO. "Good to hear your voice, sir. We're ... pretty shaken up down here. From the look of things, I think we're going to be very busy for a while." She paused, then asked, "What happened?"

"Don't know yet." All he knew was that one minute they'd been in hyperspace, the next they'd dropped out and were about to smack into a planet. "We've got casualties up here and in Engineering. Let me know when you're kitted up and ready to go."

"Yes sir. Ling out."

"Colonel?" Perry was kneeling in the mess of debris behind Caldwell's chair; it looked as if part of the ceiling had collapsed. "I've found Dr. Weir, sir."

That didn't sound good. "Is she alive?"

There was a brief, ominous pause. "I don't know, sir."

------

Impact plus 0 hours, 5 minutes

"Colonel Sheppard, we've lost contact with the Daedalus."

In Elizabeth's office, Sheppard raised his head from the card house he'd been meticulously constructing with the piles of paperwork on her desk. His original idea had been that he'd surprise Elizabeth with his energy and efficiency -- prove that he wasn't just a place-filler, holding her spot until she got back, but actually capable of doing her job, and maybe doing it even better than she could. That was before he found out just how stultifyingly boring Elizabeth's job actually was.

"What do you mean, you've lost contact?"

"Just that, sir," said the Canadian tech, Grodin's replacement, whose name Sheppard still couldn't remember. "We were receiving a transmission from the ship when it all suddenly went dead. We didn't get a distress call. It's just -- gone."

Sheppard swept a hand through his fragile construction and watched it flutter down as he rose from the desk, trying to think like Elizabeth and to damp down the part of his brain that wanted to immediately charge to the rescue. "What could cause that?"

The tech hesitated. "Well, a lot of things could cause interference -- but just cutting out like that? I'm not sure, sir. Something must have happened to their communication array. There were no problems at all beforehand. They were in hyperspace and had called in to send us some of their data from the nebula cloud, when we quit receiving from them."

"Hang on, I'm coming down there." As he trotted down to the gateroom, Sheppard asked, "Could something in the nebula have done it?"

"I don't think so, sir. They were well out of it."

"Are they near enough that we can pick them up on our long-range scanners?"

"No, sir. Not at all."

"Could they have been attacked?" He didn't want to think of it ... but damn, a Wraith hiveship could have dropped out of hyperspace right on top of them.

"I have no way to know, sir. We just have nothing to work with. I'm trying to get them back, but ..."

The gateroom was in what Sheppard recognized as its quiet emergency mode -- no panicking and there was no immediate threat, but everyone was moving with a sense of purpose and urgency. Feeling useless, Sheppard stared up at the hanging computer screens that he couldn't decipher, and tried not to listen to the tiny voice in the back of his head chanting Elizabeth and Rodney are on that ship.

He needed to do something, needed to help somehow. He'd run search-and-rescue operations before, in Afghanistan and elsewhere on Earth, even for Rodney after his puddlejumper crashed into Atlantis's sea ... but never in space. He felt desperately out of his depth, didn't even know where to begin. What would Elizabeth do? She'd probably be coordinating things, calling people, getting experts down here. Experts ... scientists ... Sheppard tapped his radio. "Science department, this is Colonel Sheppard. I need to talk to ... er, whoever's in charge down there." Embarrassingly, he really had no idea how the chain of command ran in the civilian areas of the city. When Rodney was gone, he'd normally pass science questions to Zelenka -- but, of course, Zelenka was on the Daedalus as well, leaving Sheppard without a go-to person in the labs.

A crisp female voice came back: "This is Dr. Simpson. Is there a problem?"

"I'm not sure yet," Sheppard admitted. "We've lost contact with the Daedalus. It may be nothing, but I'd like to get a science team started on it, in case they don't resume contact on their own."

To her credit, Simpson didn't argue and didn't ask stupid questions. "You're in the gateroom?" At his affirmative, she said, "I'll be right up there. Please fill me in."

As Sheppard began speaking, he felt himself settling into the familiar pattern of doing something. It didn't matter what; as long as he wasn't sitting idle while his friends were in trouble, he wouldn't be twisting himself into knots. The worry was there, but he could submerge it in the back of his mind, and do what needed to be done.

------

Impact plus 0 hours 7 minutes

"Oh shit ... Radek!"

The only light in the Daedalus's engineering room came from the fires -- tongues of orange and blue flame, eating the insulation in the bulkheads and filling the room with toxic smoke. By that flickering, lurid glow, Rodney had initially thought Zelenka was unconscious, slumped against the wall on the gently slanting floor -- until he got a good look at the piece of twisted metal protruding from Radek's chest, pinning him to the wall like a butterfly in a collector's case.

"Radek ... God ... Zelenka, can you hear me?" He heard himself speak, felt himself kneeling on the floor, all with a detached sense of unreality. This couldn't be happening. It had been such a straightforward project -- just a quick jaunt to the nebula and back in time for dinner. And then they'd crashed, and he still wanted to know why ... but would never know, because now he was going to asphyxiate, could already feel the bands of suffocation constricting across his chest ... and Radek was dead, nailed to the wall.

This was a stupid way to die. Around him, he sensed a bustle of frantic activity and knew that he should be helping try to extinguish the flames, but his horrified attention was still fixed on Zelenka's pale face.

"Doc! Hey!" Someone was shaking his shoulder -- Caldwell's chief engineer, a big guy, with arms like tree trunks, whose name Rodney had never bothered to learn. "Somebody found fire extinguishers, Doc -- we need all the hands we can get."

Rodney nodded numbly, let himself be helped to his feet. When the Daedalus had come to a stop and he'd finally grasped the idea that he wasn't going to die -- at least, not immediately -- his first reaction had been to snap into immediate action, giving orders to the handful of scientists he could find. This had lasted until he'd gotten his first good look at Zelenka, and then it had all come crashing down. He couldn't think anymore. Turning around as a fire extinguisher was shoved into his hands, he tripped over a pair of legs, and his eyes followed them up to the once-beautiful face of another scientist -- Greta or Girda, he thought her name was ... something Norwegian, anyway. She was very clearly dead. The back of her skull had been crushed, and her eyes were open.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

"Doc!" It was another of the engineers, a lanky blond guy with a weather-beaten face. He gripped Rodney's shoulder, shook him gently. As Rodney came slowly out of his fugue state, the engineer released him with a reassuring smile and turned to help someone else before Rodney could even protest the invasion of his personal space. Putting a sleeve over his face to shut out the smoke, he gritted his teeth and tried to drag his brain back to the here-and-now. It was extremely difficult to stay upright; the deck tilted underfoot, and his head swam from the fumes pouring from the fire. His entire body felt like one giant bruise -- he'd been shaken around in the crash like dice in a cup, and for all he knew, the growing headache was because of internal bleeding. He'd probably keel over any minute. Couldn't that happen after an accident, where you thought you were okay and then turned out to be bleeding inside and --

Novak came running into the room, coughing. She went straight to the chief engineer, but Rodney could hear her: "Bad news, sir. We're blocked in. The passageway is crumpled -- it looks like it was rammed by something huge."

Claustrophobia surged up in Rodney. Better to have died in the crash than to suffocate or burn to death here. A coughing fit doubled him over, and as he straightened, he felt something bump against his foot. Looking down, he saw that Zelenka's leg had twitched.

"Radek!" The fire extinguisher and even the threat of painful fiery death were forgotten. Rodney dropped to his knees beside the Czech scientist. "Radek -- Zelenka -- hey!"

Zelenka's head rolled to the side; he coughed wetly and mumbled something in Czech. Rodney gripped his shoulder, started to shake him, then thought better of it; he just left his hand there. "Radek?"

A flicker showed beneath Zelenka's eyelids. His glasses had been knocked off in the crash and he looked -- fragile. Breakable. He spoke again, snatches of words that were not English, then his head slumped onto his shoulder.

Rodney gave up. "It's, uh, it'll be all right," he attempted, inanely, and gave Radek a pat on the shoulder before letting go and straightening up with the fire extinguisher clenched in his hands like a weapon.

The air was getting thick -- Rodney had to take small gasps, and tried not to think about what the searing stuff was doing to his lungs. And it was hot. "Damn fire's inside the bulkheads -- I don't think we can get it," one of the engineers said. He laid a hand against the wall and then jerked it away with a hiss.

Rodney cast an anxious glance at Radek. Noting flames creeping uncomfortably close to the unconscious scientist, he sprayed them with the extinguisher, driving them back for the moment.

Novak was holding a flashlight for Hermiod. The Asgard did not appear to have been injured in the crash, and had been completely ignoring the fire while frantically working on one of the consoles, muttering softly to himself in his own language. Rodney joined them. "Can you actually fix that?" he demanded, incredulous.

The Asgard gave Rodney an unreadable stare from his large dark eyes. "I do not have time to answer stupid questions." He ducked back under the console, ignoring Rodney's spluttering.

"He's trying to get the fire suppression systems up and running," Novak explained, shifting the flashlight. Rodney noticed that she was holding it with her left hand; the right was tucked up against her body.

Rodney started to reply, when a blast of frigid air startled him and made him turn. Everyone else reacted as well; there was no way you could avoid feeling it, with the air turning to an oven around them. The breeze was coming from the far end of the slanting deck, disturbing the smoke and pushing it out of the way in lazy swirls.

"Found a way out!" The lanky blond engineer with personal-space confusion issues appeared from the smoke, with a broad grin on his tanned face. "There's a big hole in the side of the ship, right up that way. It looks like we got ripped open on some kind of gigantic rock -- that's what buckled the corridors outside. Had to wiggle through an air conduit to get to it, but it's not too tight a fit."

"We can't abandon the engine room, Armstrong, not if we want to get home," the chief engineer protested.

One of the scientists -- Dr. Westlake, Rodney thought it was -- cried out, "If it's that or our lives, we sure as hell can! You really think this ship is going anywhere?" A couple of people were already making moves in that direction, as cold air flowed into the room and began to dissipate some of the smoke.

The utter frigidity of the breeze made Rodney's stomach sink. Clearly it was cold outside. On the other hand, they were getting air in, not venting it out, so at least they hadn't crashed on some airless moon somewhere.

"We could at least get the wounded out," Novak said, looking sympathetically towards Radek and the handful of others who were huddled on the floor, unconscious or moaning.

This gave them something to do, and under the chief engineer's direction -- Rodney finally overheard someone use his name; it was Dewey -- began moving the wounded towards the air vent. The smoke was getting thicker and as Rodney ducked past one of the bulkheads, he saw to his horror that it was starting to develop glowing red hot spots.

"Dr. McKay!" Novak beckoned him. She was assisting a thin, blond woman who was doubled over and whimpering in pain. Reluctantly Rodney offered a shoulder, trying not to get bled on.

Between the two of them, they lifted the woman up to the hole in the ceiling, with Novak pulling and Rodney pushing from underneath. Then Rodney scrambled up after them and helped Novak pull her along what must once have been a nearly vertical ventilation shaft. Now it canted at a steep angle, difficult to navigate but not impossible. And the air, though cold, was clear of smoke; Rodney gulped it down in huge lungfuls, tasting plastic on the back of his tongue.

Novak gave a small, startled cry and vanished. Rodney caught hold of the blond woman and kept her from being dragged after, then peeked out, and his jaw dropped.

He was looking down the side of a sweeping expanse of snow-covered mountain. Snow-covered boulders and pointy, piney trees fell away into a steep valley which then rose to become another impossibly tall mountain. These were Himalaya-class mountains. A low gray ceiling of clouds hid the tops of the mountain peaks, hid the sun and made it impossible to tell what time of day it was.

A wind skirled the snow around the base of the Daedalus, and Rodney shrank back from the cold. Looking down, around the shoulder of the half-conscious blond woman, he saw that Novak had fallen a meter or so. She was sitting in the snow with her legs splayed out and her injured arm drawn up to her chest, hiccuping softly in pain.

"Hey, uh ... you okay down there?"

Novak sniffled, nodded and struggled to her feet. The snow was churned up in great heaps around the bulk of the Daedalus, mixed with car-sized boulders and splintered pine trees. She teetered from one great block of snow to another until she steadied herself on the side of the ship and helped Rodney hand down the blond woman. One of the engineers took custody of her. Looking along the sweep of the ship's hull, Rodney saw that another tear in the hull, some way down, was being used as an entry point by the straggling refugees from the engine room. He turned his head to look the other way and his jaw dropped at the mind-boggling swathe the ship had torn down the side of the mountain.

"Dr. McKay." Novak hesitantly broke in on his thoughts. "I need to get back in -- the fire --"

"Oh. Right, right." Awkwardly, Rodney wriggled backwards down the ventilation shaft and dropped out into what felt like a furnace. A stifling, smoky furnace. Novak scrambled out after him.

All the wounded had been evacuated except for Zelenka and a Daedalus engineer with a crushed pelvis who was too badly injured to risk moving her. The remainder of the Daedalus crew and Rodney's own scientists moved like silent ghosts through the smoke, hopelessly battling the fire and trying to assist Hermiod.

Rodney glanced at Novak and saw that her eyes had gone to Zelenka.

"I don't see how we can move him," she said softly, voicing Rodney's own thoughts. "It's going to take a cutting torch to get him free."

Which meant that Zelenka's life was wholly dependent upon stopping the fire. Assuming that Zelenka was still alive to save. Rodney had never seen anyone who looked that dead and wasn't actually dead. Even Sheppard with the bug on his neck hadn't looked that bad.

------

Impact plus 0 hours 14 minutes

The bridge of the Daedalus was dark, but calm. Caldwell and the less injured among the bridge crew had performed a quick triage, assessing injuries and binding wounds as best they could with only their single first-aid kit. One of the technicians had been killed when his console blew up on his face on impact; otherwise the most severely wounded on the bridge were a security officer, Airman McKinney, whose leg had been severed at the knee ... and Elizabeth Weir.

She was buried in debris. One look with a flashlight let Caldwell know that digging her out by hand wasn't really an option, at least not without a lot of strong men and a lot of time -- and he'd want a medical team standing by in any case. Several large beams from the ceiling had pinned her, and then further debris had completely buried her. Perry had found her accidentally by stepping on one of her hands, which hadn't even drawn a twitch. The hand was the only part of her that was visible at the moment. Perry hadn't been able to find a pulse at first, and in fact wasn't even sure if the hand was still attached, but after trying a few times he said that he'd gotten something, and when he squeezed her hand she'd squeezed back, very weakly. Caldwell thought that this might just be wishful thinking, but he didn't say anything.

Reports were coming back from the rest of the ship, and they weren't good. The fire in Engineering was out of control, and they had two dead bodies down there, along with two people -- Dr. Zelenka and Sgt. Packee -- who, from the sound of things, would be dead soon if they didn't get medical help. No deaths had been reported in the sickbay, but there were some pretty bad injuries, and the medical staff couldn't get out at the moment to help anyone else -- they'd suffered a hull breach in the crash and the computers had slammed shut the emergency doors throughout the ship, before going down along with the power. Now the ship was divided into compartments and they had no way to undo it. Caldwell and his flight crew were stuck on the bridge; some people were trapped in hallways; one unlucky tech was locked in a bathroom and apparently panicking.

They had cutting torches on board, but getting to them was going to be next to impossible, and even if they could, the torches required electricity to work ... which made them useless unless Hermiod could get the power back on.

Unable to do anything else, Caldwell paced and tried to keep people calm over the radios, while brainstorming with the rest of his bridge crew -- those of them who were coherent enough, anyway -- on possible strategies for opening up the sealed sections of the ship.

"I hate to say it," Perry said, "but I think we're basically looking at explosives. There's nothing else that'll get those doors open, considering what we have to work with and the time frame we're looking at."

Caldwell had more or less come to the same conclusion himself. The idea of blowing up parts of his own ship was galling -- he'd rather cut off his own hand. But slowly suffocating behind the bulkheads didn't seem like much of an alternative. They weren't out of oxygen yet, but with the life support down and the air hazy with smoke from minor electrical fires, it was already getting a bit stuffy.

"How many demolitions experts do we have?" he asked Perry. "There's Sgt. Theodore in Weapons ..."

"And Lt. Cadman," Perry supplied. The Lieutenant was currently on the Daedalus at Sheppard's request. It wasn't often that they took this sort of short trip within the galaxy, and Sheppard wanted some of his regular people to get experience on a starship. He figured that he might have to outfit his own starship crew on short notice -- between hiveships and Ancient ships littered around the galaxy, you just never knew when you were going to suddenly find yourself in possession of a ship. "I imagine most of us can set C4 if we have to, though, sir."

"It wouldn't necessarily be C4 ..." One thing about the Daedalus: it had no shortage of things that went 'boom'. Caldwell tapped his radio. "Cadman? Where are you?"

"In the mess, sir." Her frustrated voice came back immediately.

"Are you hurt?"

"Ankle's a bit twisted, sir, but I'm fine, I think."

"I have a job for you, Lieutenant," Caldwell began, and then broke off at the sound of a very small moan from under the pile of debris at his feet. He gestured frantically to Perry, who came over and knelt down to take Elizabeth's hand while Caldwell discussed explosives and timing and routes around the ship with Cadman. By the time they got that sorted out, the moaning had stopped. Caldwell leaned down by Perry, who looked up at him with his long, thin face half obscured by shadows. "She's passed out again, sir," he said.

"I guessed." Caldwell frowned down at the small white shape of Elizabeth's hand. She was his responsibility, goddammit. All of them were. He hated this, and he still wanted to know what had happened to his ship and his people. Not that he didn't have an inkling.

"Need to talk to you for a minute, Perry." His XO released Elizabeth's wrist and got up to follow him to a quiet corner of the bridge, where Caldwell leaned unobtrusively against the wall. His head was still throbbing; he didn't think he was actually concussed, but he kept getting dizzy when he moved too quickly, and the slanting deck didn't help at all. Lowering his voice so that he couldn't be heard in the rest of the room, Caldwell said, "Did you get any signals before we dropped out of hyperspace -- any readings that were off, any strange radio transmissions, anything at all?"

"No, sir. But then, I wasn't looking for anything, either." Perry frowned. "Do you have a theory, sir?"

Caldwell knew full well what he was asking, and that Perry knew why his CO had taken him aside, where they couldn't be heard. "I certainly don't have a suspect. I trust my crew. Then again, I trusted me until a few months ago." Most of the Daedalus crew, particularly the current crew, didn't know what had happened to their captain with the Goa'uld -- all they knew was that he'd been wounded somehow on Atlantis. The officers were aware of the situation, though, and particularly Perry, who was close to a friend. "It could easily have been a hyperdrive malfunction -- although if so, I sure as hell want some heavy-duty testing done before I take this ship back into space."

Perry said nothing about the odds of this ship ever flying anywhere again. "Hermiod would probably know if the hyperdrive was functioning normally before our ... accident."

"Hermiod's a little busy at the moment. But, yes, as soon as we have the survival problem nailed down, I do intend to ask him. In the meantime, stay alert, Major. If this was deliberate, I have no intention of letting the individual, or individuals, responsible get away with it. Stay alert and be careful."

------

Impact plus 0 hours 21 minutes

"Rodney, get out of here," Zelenka managed to say in a hoarse whisper.

"Did I ask you? I don't remember asking you," Rodney snapped, stepping quickly across him with a fire extinguisher.

The engine room was an oven, wrapped in a haze of smoke. They seemed to be able to contain the spread of the fire in the room itself, but they could do nothing about the fire behind the bulkheads, and it was slowly baking them alive.

Novak brought Rodney a bottle of water before darting back to help Hermiod at the console. He drank half of it without thinking, astounded at how thirsty he was, then knelt down beside Zelenka. "Here. Drink."

Zelenka tried to swallow, but ended up coughing most of it back up; water dribbled down his chin to mingle with sweat and blood. Even in the reddish light, his face was pale. "What happened?" he asked softly.

"We crashed."

Though white as a sheet and too weak to raise his head, Zelenka managed to look annoyed. "I do know that much, Rodney."

"What kind of answer are you looking for, then? Do I look like some sort of federal spaceflight disaster investigator to you? Maybe Hermiod can't fly straight and ran into a planet. I don't know."

The corners of Zelenka's mouth twitched. "You need to calm down, Rodney. Stress is not good for you." His eyelids fluttered shut.

"Stress? Gee, I wonder why I'm stressed! We're all about to burn to death and you've got a fucking steel beam sticking out of your chest!"

The soft eyes opened again. "Rodney, I am serious. Don't stay on my account. Get out when you have to."

"When did I ever say I was sticking around because of you? I'm here because if the engines go up in flames, we'll end up eating each other's frozen corpses on this rock. That's assuming that we don't all perish in a giant fireball within the next few minutes, considering the quantity of various exploding elements within close proximity of where we now sit."

Zelenka just smiled a little bit and his head flopped over to the side.

"Quit passing out, would you? It makes you very difficult to talk to," Rodney muttered. After a moment, he shrugged out of his jacket and rolled it up against Zelenka's shoulder, to prop up his head.

Without the jacket, it was a little less oppressively hot, but, paradoxically, he shivered in the searing blasts of icy air that swirled around the room each time the wind blew outside. Some of the engineers had had the idea of bringing in snow from outside to try to extinguish the fire or at least cool down the wall, which had resulted in the floor on the downslope side being awash in sooty water, and his shoes were soaked ... just another little bit of misery. Coughing on burning plastic fumes, he sloshed out of the puddles to the main engineering console, where the only visible part of Hermiod was his feet. Rodney had tried several times to offer assistance -- well, "offer" wasn't really the best word, more like "impose" -- only to be firmly rebuffed. However, standing around waiting to burn to death while other people fixed the problem was simply not in his nature. Also, the sheer idiocy of not taking advantage of his intellect at a time like this floored him ... especially since he was probably losing brain cells by the thousands due to the fumes; they'd better use his brain while he still had it!

"Hermiod--" he began.

The feet stiffened. Novak opened her mouth to say something, then stopped and reached for her radio. And there was another thing -- they hadn't given him a radio. All the crew had them; however, the civilians on the Daedalus did not. He'd actually contemplated taking one from a dead engineer, but couldn't quite bring himself to do it.

Feeling annoyed, worried, ignored and useless, Rodney glowered balefully at Novak while she talked to Caldwell in a soft urgent voice. Occasionally she glanced at him and then her eyes skittered hastily away as he continued to glare. As soon as she finished talking, he demanded, "Well? Now what?"

"They're planning to use explosives to blow the sealed emergency doors in the rest of the ship. But they can't get to the cargo holds where the explosives are kept -- we, however, can."

"We can?" He glanced automatically towards the corridor leading into the rest of the ship -- which had been crumpled and blocked in the crash. "No, we can't."

Novak gestured towards the ventilation shaft, then winced, as she'd used her injured hand. "From outside. That's where we took the wounded -- into one of the cargo bays."

Oh, right. The other big hole in the hull. "And they want us to go dig out explosives for them?" Rodney demanded, incredulous. "We're a little busy here, considering that the ship's on fire!" Then, reflecting back on what he'd said, he paused and his mouth dropped open.

"All the more reason to blow the emergency doors so everyone can get out," Novak said. Then she noticed the look on his face. "What is it?"

"Explosives! Fire!" Rodney snapped his fingers. "That's how they extinguish oil well fires -- with dynamite!"

Novak stared at him. "You want to blow up Engineering to put out the fire?"

Hermiod's bald gray head popped up from behind the console. "That does not sound like a prudent course of action."

"Oh really? Well, it seems to me that at the rate things are going, we're all going to burn to death while we wait for you to fix the fire suppression system!"

The Asgard's dark eyes narrowed dangerously.

Novak pointed nervously towards the ventilation shaft leading outside. "I have to, er, go find explosives for Col. Caldwell ..." She scuttled off in great haste.

Rodney and Hermiod continued to glare at each other. Rodney lost; he had to look away when he dissolved into a coughing fit because of the smoke. Hermiod, muttering to himself in Asgard, vanished beneath the console again.

"Coward," Rodney grumbled. Privately, he sent annoyed vibes in Sheppard's general direction for corrupting him so badly that he now found the whole idea of deliberately blowing things up to be an eminently sensible response in a crisis.

He wondered, briefly, what Sheppard was doing right now, and if anyone on Atlantis had any idea of their plight.

------

Impact plus 0 hours 27 minutes

As far as Sheppard could tell, nearly half an hour after losing contact with the Daedalus, they still didn't know any more than they had at first: namely, that it was gone without a trace, taking over 200 people with it ... not the least of them, from Sheppard's point of view, being Elizabeth and Rodney.

The scientists, along with the gateroom staff, were plotting out the ship's hyperspace course to try to figure out where it might be. And Sheppard paced, frustrated and angry and unable to do anything.

He looked up when Beckett barreled into the gateroom at a near run. The doctor paused, looked around, zeroed in on Sheppard and made a beeline for him. "Colonel, there's a rumor running around the infirmary that something's happened to the Daedalus."

That was what he got for speaking on an open channel. All of Atlantis probably knew by now. "We're having some kind of communication problem, Doc; we don't know if it's worse than that yet."

"I see." Carson sat down in the nearest available chair and clasped his hands on top of the console. Sheppard remembered belatedly that not only were Elizabeth and Rodney on the Daedalus at the moment -- probably Carson's two closest friends -- but Lt. Cadman was as well. Damn. No wonder he looked white.

Simpson looked up from her displays. "We have an estimate for the approximate location of the Daedalus, Colonel, based on its speed, trajectory and the time that we lost contact. Assuming that the Daedalus dropped out of hyperspace when it stopped broadcasting, there are a few different Stargates in systems in the area that we could try dialing to see if we can get a signal from them."

Sheppard nodded. "Do it."

As one of the other technicians began dialing the gate, Beckett asked quietly, "What if they're still in hyperspace?"

"Then they'll have to contact us, because we have no other way of locating them. They're too far out for the long-range scanners to pick them up. We've been hailing them for the last half hour and haven't gotten a response."

Sheppard sat down on the edge of a console. "And if they dropped out of hyperspace sometime between when we lost contact and now?"

Simpson's face darkened. "Then they could be anywhere within a few hundred light-years of their last known position. We'd probably never find them."

Sheppard looked up at the gate as the familiar burst of blue light ka-whooshed and settled into steady rippling. "Then I guess we better hope that's not the case, Doc."

------

Impact plus 0 hours 30 minutes

"Rodney, I'm telling you how to do it; it isn't my fault you keep refusing to listen to me."

"I'm listening dammit!" Except that he kept tuning her out by sheer habit. Having Laura Cadman's voice speaking in his ear, even if it was only into a radio, brought back memories that he'd rather not dwell on. And having her tell him what to do, especially when he was perfectly confident that he could have figured it out on his own if he'd just been allowed to sit still for a moment without annoying blond Lieutenants yakking at him ...

Novak had provided him a radio, and Cadman, still trapped in her own section of the ship, was talking them through the process of setting the explosives to contain the fire.

"As soon as they go off, you'll need to be ready with extinguishers. This should put out most of the flames, but you'll still have hot spots and they can easily re-ignite. You don't really want to do this twice ... or more."

"We get it, we get it," Rodney muttered.

"Are you ready?"

"Yes, yes -- ready." Retreating from the bulkhead, he paused to untuck his jacket from under Radek's neck and threw it over the unconscious scientist's head and torso, in the hopes of shielding him from debris. If they got a backwash of flames -- which Cadman had told them was a possibility -- there wasn't a damn thing he could do to prevent Zelenka from becoming scientist flambe-on-a-stick, but at least he could prevent him from getting rakish scars that would attract every eligible woman in the labs.

Cadman spoke over the general channel in a calm, businesslike voice. "We're setting off explosives in the engineering section. All nonessential personnel need to clear out. As soon as we get the all-clear, Colonel, do we have permission to proceed?"

"You have permission to do whatever you need to do in order to ensure the safety of the people on this ship, Lieutenant," Caldwell retorted brusquely.

"We're clear," Novak's voice came over the radio.

"Okay, Rodney. Like we talked about. Go."

Rodney tried to figure out just how, exactly, he'd ended up being the one setting off the explosives. Well, maybe because it was his idea, but still ...

Sheppard would never let him live this down.

He hit the button.

There was a muffled WHOOMPH and a concussive wave of air momentarily blew the smoke out of the room. As the haze rushed back, the designated fire brigade of relatively-uninjured engineers and scientists sprang into action, using extinguishers and snow to eliminate what was left of the fire.

"Dewey, McKay, report," Caldwell ordered.

Rodney promptly opened his mouth to object that Caldwell had no authority over him, but the chief engineer spoke first, with fervent relief in his voice. "I think that got it, sir. We're still cleaning up the hot spots, but I think that did it."

"Well done, you guys!" Cadman chirped cheerfully, and then turned her attention to the next priority -- blowing the doors in the sickbay. Rodney tuned her out as he sank against the wall with a long sigh of relief.

Novak edged up next to him. "Nice work," she said quietly.

"Um, thanks." He glanced sideways at her -- smoke, dirt and blood had made a mess of her face, and he suspected that he probably didn't look any better. She was still holding her arm tucked up to her chest, the awkward posture making him think of a wounded bird, and he felt as if he should say something. "Uh, are you -- is that, eh, broken, do you think?"

"I'm trying really hard not to think about it. At least," she added with a nervous laugh, "I was until you asked me about it."

"Oh. Sorry." He still couldn't get his brains together. He felt as if something vital to his intellectual integrity had been lost, left behind in space, and now he was just scrambling to keep up with everyone else.

"Were you hurt, in the crash?"

"I ..." This was the first time he'd realized that he'd never really taken inventory. He was bruised, he knew that, and from the feel of things he had one gigantic bruise over his right thigh that he didn't even want to look at. It amazed him to find that he wasn't all that worried about internal bleeding, crushed-limb trauma or any of the other things that he would normally be worrying about. Hypochondria, too, had been left behind, submerged in the much greater crises of the people around him. "Not really," he managed to say.

Novak nodded as if she understood.

------

Impact plus 0 hours 34 minutes

Caldwell could tell when they began blowing the doors. The muffled vibration of explosions elsewhere in the ship was transmitted up through his feet and through the hand that he'd rested against a wall. It was hard, so hard to accept the necessity of damaging the ship even more than it had been damaged in the crash. But the ship was only plastic and steel. There were lives at stake.

"We're through the sickbay doors, sir," Cadman reported. "There are still at least two sets that are going to have to be blown before they can make it to you, though."

"Do what you need to, Lieutenant."

It was hard, too, to stand here doing nothing. He wanted to be out there, helping them.

"Dewey, what's it looking like down in Engineering?"

The engineer's voice sounded strained. Major Brian Dewey was a quiet man with a cool head in a crisis, definitely the sort of person you wanted running your engines in a combat situation. Caldwell had never seen him ruffled, even with Wraith ships bearing down on them and circuitry exploding everywhere. The fact that he sounded so stressed was a strong indication of how bad it was. "The fire's out, sir, but we're still assessing the extent of the damage. At the very least, we're not going anywhere anytime soon."

Understatement of the year. "Any chance you can get the power back online?"

"Hermiod's working on it, sir, but honestly ... I doubt it. There's just too much damage, and we don't dare bring the power core back online without extensive repairs."

"Understood." Which meant they were stuck here. "You people have access to the outside, right? What's it look like out there?"

There was a brief hesitation. "I haven't actually been out there yet, sir. I'm going to turn you over to someone who has. Lt. Armstrong? You're outside, right?"

"Here, sir."

Armstrong. Native Minnesotan, Caldwell recalled, and a skilled outdoorsman who'd been stationed in both the Arctic and Antarctic. "Lieutenant, report. Where've we touched down?"

"We're on a mountain, sir." There was a pause and he could hear crunching sounds -- boots in snow, he guessed, even before the lieutenant said, "It's winter, sir -- either that or we're very high up, or it's a very cold planet, or both. High, sharp mountains all around us. Glaciated. No sign of habitation that I can see anywhere. Lots of snow. Actually, if it wasn't for the snow we'd probably have taken a lot more damage to the ship. I can only imagine that it helped cushion our landing a bit."

"Guess Lady Luck works in mysterious ways, Lieutenant."

There was a short laugh. "Yes, sir. You want me to explore a little?"

"Negative, Lieutenant. Nobody goes anywhere until we get everyone together and take care of the wounded. It looks like we're on our own, so our first priority is assembling in one place and taking stock of our supplies."

"Yes, sir."

Caldwell signed off and leaned against the wall for a moment. Captain Kleinman, who was bent over one of the darkened consoles with a flashlight, said without looking up, "Did I hear correctly? Ice planet?"

"Or something like it. You like the snow, Captain?"

Kleinman grinned. "I'm a city boy myself, Colonel. You?"

"Grew up on a farm, actually. But I'm not much for snow. Guess you can always teach an old dog new tricks, though." He gestured at the equipment. "How's that coming?"

"I think our emergency beacon is transmitting, sir, though it's hard to be sure. But otherwise, without power, our external communications are totally down. And we can't boost the signals on the radios without it, either, which means we're very limited in how far we can go while staying in touch with each other."

Perry asked from nearby, "What about the F302s?"

There was a point. Caldwell tapped his radio. "Anyone got a status report on the hangar bay?"

After a moment, Dewey responded. "I can't tell you firsthand, sir, but looking at the way the ship is situated and what it looks like outside Engineering, I wouldn't be surprised if it's completely inaccessible. A lot of the access corridors on that side of the ship are crumpled."

Cadman's voice came on to ask, "Is that a priority, sir? I can divert --"

"Negative, Lieutenant. Only if there are people trapped there, and nobody's reported back from that section." He refused to consider what that might mean. "People first. That's your top priority."

"Yes, sir. Cadman out."

"Sir?" one of the bridge security crew -- Airman Seavey -- called from her position next to the pile of rubble burying Elizabeth Weir. "You wanted to know if she woke up, sir. I think she's awake."

Caldwell knelt beside the young Airman, and laid his hand in Weir's cold palm. Immediately the fingers responded, curling around his own. They felt like ice. "Dr. Weir? Seavey tells me you've decided to rejoin us."

There was a soft, dry cough, then Elizabeth's voice said softly, "The flight was very enjoyable, but I can't say I think much of your landings, Colonel."

Caldwell smiled in the dark. "Yes, I'll have to speak to someone about that." Another dry cough came from under the pile of rubble, and he asked, "At the risk of sounding like a bit of an idiot, Doctor, how do you feel?"

After a moment's silence, Weir said, "Strange."

"In what way?"

"Disconnected." Her voice did, indeed, have a sort of dreamy quality to it. "I can't move, really, but nothing seems to hurt. Well, it hurts, but not in an ... urgent sort of way."

He wished he could see her, because it was damned hard to gauge a person's physical health when all you had to go by was some rambling from under a pile of rubble. "We'll have a medical team up here fairly soon." As if to emphasize his words, the deck trembled slightly as another explosion shook the ship.

Something groaned and shifted in the pile of debris covering Elizabeth. She gave a small, startled gasp, and her hand on Caldwell's flinched.

"Dr. Weir?" he asked sharply.

"I'm ... I'm here." After a hesitation, she said, "I felt something move."

"I know, but I think the pile on top of you is fairly stable -- it just shifted a little. Just relax; we'll have you out of there as quickly as possible." He gave her hand a final squeeze and straightened, allowing Airman Seavey to move in and take his position. Looking around, he saw Perry meet his eyes across the heap of debris, and picked his way around its edge, climbing over a beam, so that he could speak to his XO out of Elizabeth's earshot.

"That's very bad," Perry murmured.

"I know. But I can't exactly tell Cadman to stop blowing doors. We can't stay trapped in here forever, and there really isn't any other way." He knew that he was trying to justify his decision to himself, even knowing that it was the correct one. They had wounded people up here, including Elizabeth herself, who urgently needed medical attention. And without more manpower and equipment, there was very little chance that they could get her out alive anyway. As he'd said, there was no other way -- the risk of accidentally crushing her was one they simply had to take.

Didn't mean he had to like it. Didn't mean he liked being the one to make the call, either.

"I don't just mean her situation," Perry murmured. He gestured around them. "Who knows how stable the whole thing is? And there may be others buried like she is."

Caldwell sucked in his breath through his teeth, thinking, hating the conclusions he was coming to. "I know. And there's still no choice. What else can we do, try to cut ourselves out with hand tools?" He tapped his radio, and said, "Cadman. Channel 6, please."

"Sir," Cadman said after a moment over the relatively private channel.

"Lieutenant, we've had a concern arise over possibly bringing down some of the badly damaged sections of the ship with the vibrations from the explosives."

"I don't think it's that badly damaged, sir, and we're taking that into account."

"That may be, but we've noticed a bit of shifting up here. And we have one badly injured person who's trapped under debris, who may not be the only one. I'm not telling you to stop, Lieutenant, because we need what you're doing. But use the absolute minimum charges that you can, and if you don't absolutely have to blow something to rescue a trapped person, then don't do it."

"Oh." She sounded subdued. "I take it we're using a private channel because this isn't public knowledge, sir?"

"You'd be right, Lieutenant. Be discrete, be careful, and keep blowing things up."

"Yes, sir."

------

Impact plus 0 hours 39 minutes

"It's not really through his chest so much as it's through his shoulder," the medic explained. She was a petite strawberry-blond woman who had introduced herself as Cora something-or-other. At any other time, Rodney wouldn't have been able to keep his eyes off her, but at the moment, all he could do was jitter nervously from foot to foot as she checked over Zelenka from a portable medical bag and began setting up an IV.

As she straightened up and began calmly entering numbers into a clipboard, Rodney finally lost mouth containment. "But -- but -- you're just leaving it there? Isn't that some kind of clear violation of the Hippocratic Oath? I don't care if it's in his shoulder, his thorax or his left ventricle -- it's still definitely not supposed to be in any part of a human body!"

Cora Somebody-or-Other marched up into Rodney's personal space, her neatly plucked brows drawn together with a fine line between them. "Mister McKay, we have no electricity, no heat, no way to move any surgical equipment from the sickbay if it's not small and portable, and only one doctor on the ship. We are not performing any surgeries at the moment unless we absolutely have to ... and your friend is not bleeding that badly."

"But ... metal! In his chest!"

"Shoulder," the medic corrected grimly. "Now, I'm giving him fluids, antibiotics, painkillers and a mild sedative. If you want to help him, you can head down to sickbay or one of the supply bays and get some blankets. He may be here for a while, and it's going to get cold. But first, let me take a look at you."

Rodney, a bit dazedly, allowed her to flash a light in his eyes and slap a blood pressure cuff on his arm. "I'm fine," he said.

"I'll be the judge of that. We have people walking around here with so much adrenaline in their bodies that they're telling us they're perfectly fine while dragging broken limbs." She tore the cuff off his arm. "Any pain? Deformity? Dizziness? Trouble walking?"

"I told you. I'm fine. Quit that!" he snapped as she stuck a thermometer in his ear.

"You do seem to be fine -- thankfully, because I'm sure you'd be a delightful patient if you weren't. Now go make yourself useful and bring your friend some blankets."

"Your bedside manner sucks!" Rodney told her retreating back as she headed towards Novak.

He had to pity the medics, though. There weren't very many of them, and they had to tend to nearly 200 people, many of whom appeared to have major injuries. But still ... metal! Stuck in Zelenka's chest! There had to be something wrong with that. It made him feel ill just looking at it. All he wanted to do was get as far away as possible. Surely there had to be something useful he could be doing elsewhere in the ship ... Nonetheless, he couldn't explain why he found himself crouching down next to the injured scientist. "Hey, Radek. You in there?"

The light eyes cracked open. "Rodney," he acknowledged, and rolled his head to the side, peering up at the IV.

"You feel any better? Someone who is not a doctor, and not really much of a nurse, gave you this." Rodney twitched at the IV line with his fingertips. "Supposed to be some happy drugs in there."

"Cold," Zelenka whispered.

"Yes, well, that would be because we're on some kind of ice planet. I'm off to pick you up some blankets, doctor's orders. You want anything else? Water, food, hot and cold running nurses? I'm taking requests." He tried to smile. This was somehow easier with Sheppard, even in situations like this -- and heaven knew they did get into a lot of situations like this. Well, not exactly like this ... but the whole "waiting for a friend to live or die" thing -- with Sheppard, he was sort of getting used to it. And he felt responsible for Zelenka, in a lot of ways, not the least of them being that Zelenka wouldn't even be here if he hadn't pitched this stupid idea to Caldwell in the first place.

In fact, none of them would be here. "Oh God," Rodney murmured as realization dawned. "I've killed us all, haven't I?"

"I see that your ego is as large as ever." Zelenka's eyes drifted shut. "Somehow you have missed the part where we are adults and doing things of our own free will."

"Girda's dead," Rodney said, around a choking lump in his throat. He hadn't even really known the woman, but damn, he was tired of his staff dropping dead because of his mistakes. At this rate he wasn't going to have any scientists left by the New Year.

"Her name is ... was Greta ... Greta Estvaag." Zelenka blinked sleepily up at Rodney. "And yes ... yes I know. I saw her die. She was in front of me. She has two sisters ... and a cat ..."

"God, Radek, I'm so sorry," Rodney whispered. "For all of this."

Zelenka's eyelids slid shut. "If you're truly sorry, then how about some blankets ... and maybe that nice lab by the transporters, when we get back to Atlantis."

"The lab -- you mean the one where I run spectrographic analysis?"

"Where you used to run spectrographic analysis." His voice faded, trailing into sleep. "I have been thinking it would be very nice for spreading out jumper circuit diagrams ... and repairing broken control crystals ... very nice indeed ..."

"Radek?" Rodney nudged at him lightly, felt for a pulse, almost panicked when he couldn't feel anything and then realized it was because he didn't have his fingers anywhere near an artery. "Blankets," he said to himself, "blankets are good," and straightened up, wincing a little as his bruises twinged at him. Maybe he'd spoken too soon to whatsername, Cora, about being fine. Maybe she had Tylenol or something.

It was definitely getting colder in the engine room. As he made his way to the ventilation shaft that still provided their only way in and out of the room, Rodney looked over at Hermiod and wondered how Asgard dealt with the cold. Could you put a parka on an Asgard? Would it wear it? For that matter, did they have any parkas on the ship? We'd better, he thought, and remembered to retrieve his jacket before climbing up the shaft's diagonal slant.

Dropping out of the opening in the side of the ship was like plunging into ice water. He may as well have left the jacket where it was, covering Zelenka's legs, because the wind went straight through it. They'd better have cold-weather gear, or they were all going to be a bunch of popsicles by the end of the day.

The region alongside the hull of the Daedalus was like an avalanche zone, huge broken chunks of ice and boulders and frozen ground. Rodney slipped and slithered his way to the big rip in the hull that apparently, judging from what he'd heard, led into the cargo bays. Unfortunately the opening didn't reach all the way to the ground, so he had to grab hold of the jagged edges of the metal and pull himself up ... not really his forte even on a good day. Fortunately, someone inside noticed his difficulty and a warm hand closed over his half-frozen one, hauling him up. It was the big blond guy -- Armstrong -- and Rodney couldn't help noticing he was wearing a parka.

"We have coats?" he asked, feeling pathetic as he tucked his hands into his sleeves.

Armstrong nodded and pointed deeper into the wide-open space. Rodney saw lights farther in, and trekked that way, hoping that the presence of light meant that some kind of electricity had been turned on.

It turned out that the light came from a variety of non-electrical sources -- glowsticks and Coleman lanterns which had been set on top of crates or spread around to illuminate a large area. This was immediately evident as the ship's impromptu center of operations. There were already fifty or sixty people assembled, opening crates and arranging supplies under the watchful eyes of several officers, and more bedraggled-looking refugees kept trickling in. Cots had been set up for the wounded. Due to the way that the ship had twisted during the crash, the floor was very nearly level here, which made a nice change of pace.

Rodney looked around for any of his people, and soon located the remaining scientists besides Zelenka and Greta, all huddled in a knot near a big pile of crates. Obviously, no one had given them anything to do and they were feeling isolated and scared. He forged towards them through the mass of soldiers, and they came to meet him, looking pathetically overjoyed to see him. He was a lot more accustomed to being greeted with fear or at least a hasty scramble to look busy. Abject gratitude made him deeply uncomfortable and he tried to brush them off.

"How's Rad -- uh, Dr. Zelenka?" asked one of the Russian physicists.

"Impaled," Rodney said shortly. "They tell me it's not as bad as it looks. I suspect they're right, because if it was, he'd be dead. What are you all standing around for? Isn't there anything you can do to make yourselves less useless?" Strange how having people to order around helped him to shake off his own lethargy and fear.

He soon had the scientists scrambling off to help the military contingent in various ways, and he'd gotten himself a parka and an armload of blankets. Why in the world the Daedalus carried Arctic survival gear was beyond him; he'd also seen a couple of rubber rafts and wetsuits in the same area, so maybe they just hauled survival equipment for all conceivable conditions as a general rule. He could tell by looking, though, that there weren't very many parkas -- which meant it was a good thing he'd managed to grab one early. No way he was letting his valuable brain freeze, and Caldwell had better see it that way too, because now that he was in his parka, they would have to pry it off his cold dead corpse.

Hmm. Bad thought.

He added a couple bottles of water from another crate to his Radek care package, then slithered down into the snow and scrambled back to the ventilation hole. This time he paused for a moment to study just how, exactly, a completely enclosed ventilation shaft had become an opening to the outside. It wasn't a pretty picture -- the skin of the Daedalus had actually been peeled back from that part of the hull like the lid of a tin can. Rodney shuddered as he threw the blankets into the opening and climbed in after them.

Zelenka was unconscious and unresponsive when he got back to the engine room. Rodney hoped that it was because of Cora's promised drugs and not because of something more sinister and lethal. He carefully tucked several of the blankets around the too-still scientist, then set a bottle of water by his hand and went off to give the blankets to one of the medics.

Having done that, he made a beeline for the main engineering console where Hermiod and Novak had their heads together ... because, dammit, his brains were totally going to waste on playing gofer, Radek was dying in the hands of people who clearly had no medical qualifications whatsoever, and they had to get off this frozen wasteland before he went crazy.

Novak was murmuring something in an undertone. She broke off abruptly when Rodney walked up. She and Hermiod shared a look.

"What?" he demanded. "I'm here to help. And I'm not taking no for an answer this time."

"That's not it," Novak said. She looked at Hermiod again. He blinked his large eyes and gave her a small, slow nod. She smiled a little and reached into a pocket of her BDUs with her uninjured hand, while Rodney watched with no attempt to conceal his impatience.

"Well? What?"

"I believe I have learned the reason for our mishap," Hermiod said quietly, tilting his head to one side.

Novak dropped a small object into Rodney's palm. As soon as he got a good look at it, he tried to recoil from the greasy-smooth feel of semiorganic circuitry. Raising his eyes, he saw both of them watching him, Novak with a certain eager hope and Hermiod with his usual inscrutability.

"This is Wraith."

Hermiod nodded and spoke very quietly. "We were sabotaged."

------

Impact plus 0 hours 45 minutes

"Trying the seventh gate address, sir."

They were going through Simpson's list of possible Stargates as quickly as possible: dialing the gate, sending signals on all the radio frequencies used by the Daedalus, listening for a reply, then shutting the gate down and dialing another. As Simpson pointed out, they could easily be missing a signal, especially if it was weak -- but if the Daedalus was in trouble, time might be of the essence. They could do a more thorough investigation of each gate if the initial sweep found nothing.

Beckett sat very quietly at the side of the room, not interrupting, just watching. Teyla and Ronon had also joined them; Sheppard realized that he had no idea when the pair of them had turned up in the room. They were just there, Ronon leaning on a wall and Teyla sitting lightly on the top of the steps leading down to the gate. Just watching, all of them watching.

"How many more to go after this one?" Sheppard asked.

"Twelve."

Sheppard whistled. "That's a lot." But not a lot, not total, not when those gates could be the only chance to find their missing people. Still, knowing how spread out the Stargates were, it seemed to cover an alarmingly huge area. Using the jumpers to search the same area would take them hundreds of years, he thought, feeling slightly ill.

"Hyperspace is fast," the scientist replied tersely, eyes on her screens as she typed quickly. "We're dealing with rough estimates here, too, regarding their speed and course heading. I'm starting with what I consider the most likely possibilities and expanding out --"

"Sir!" The Canadian technician swiveled back around, looking torn between joy and worry. "We're getting a signal from this one. Just a second, I'm boosting it ... It's the emergency distress beacon from the Daedalus. We've found it!"

Sheppard caught his breath. From the corner of his eye, he saw Teyla smiling and Ronon sitting up with an alert expression. Yes, they had found it ... but the ship was clearly in trouble, or it wouldn't be broadcasting a distress call. "Hail them," Sheppard said.

"Daedalus, this is Atlantis. Come in, Daedalus, do you read?"

He repeated it a few more times before shaking his head. "No answer. They either can't receive us or can't broadcast."

Sheppard swallowed against the dryness in his throat, then turned when one of the other technicians made a startled sound. "There's something else broadcasting in this system, sir."

"Oh my God," Simpson whispered, bending over his shoulder.

Sheppard looked, but the readouts meant nothing to him. "What is it?"

The tech looked up at him, all color drained from his face. "It's a Wraith distress beacon, sir."

------

Impact plus 0 hours 48 minutes

"Colonel? We've reached your position, sir. We're ready to blow the last set of doors. You folks might want to get behind something."

Faintly, a pounding sound came from the emergency doors sealing off the bridge.

"Acknowledged, Cadman. Wait for my mark." The bridge crew, isolated from most of the rest of the ship and sealed behind more bulkheads, were one of the last groups to be freed. As Perry quietly and efficiently directed the evacuation of the wounded to the far side of the bridge, Caldwell leaned down beside Airman Seavey. The young soldier seemed to be taking her responsibility to the injured Dr. Weir very seriously -- she had remained crouched at Elizabeth's side, rubbing the woman's cold hand and talking to her softly. Sensing her CO's presence at her side, she looked up with wide eyes.

"At ease, Airman. Suggest you take cover."

"Yes, sir, but ..." She looked down at her hand, still folded over Elizabeth's, dark skin on pale. "What about her, sir?"

"She's more sheltered than we are, Airman." If only that were true. The debris over Elizabeth had shifted and settled several more times as the Daedalus trembled from Cadman's detonations. So far, nothing important seemed to have moved, but Caldwell could sense that the pile of rubble was in precarious balance. Elizabeth's life hung by a thousand threads -- each one suspending a piece of debris that could crash down and sever a limb, an artery.

"She's been awake, off and on, sir," Airman Seavey told him, reluctantly relinquishing her position at Elizabeth's side as Perry tugged on her shoulder. "I think she's conscious now, but she's just listening. She's been quiet."

Caldwell nodded thanks to Perry, who led the young woman to join some of the others behind an intact console near the forward viewports, and leaned forward to lay his hand on top of Elizabeth's. It was strange and a bit awkward, lending this sort of physical comfort to someone with whom he'd always had a much more distant working relationship. But he'd been in enough combat zones to know how human contact could calm fear and pain, even between strangers -- or relative strangers such as the two of them. It would be better for Elizabeth if one of her friends were here to hold her hand. But none were, and so her cold, shaky fingers curled around his own.

"You're not Keisha," said the soft, quizzical voice of the trapped woman.

Elizabeth had somehow managed to get on a first-name basis with half his bridge crew just in the few short hours she'd been on the ship. "No, Seavey's taken shelter. They're about to detonate explosives to open the doors to the bridge. Then we'll be able to dig you out."

Quiet, so quiet he could barely hear her: "You're not doing me any favors with half-truths, Steven."

And deliberate use of his first name. They'd never been Steven and Elizabeth to each other, would probably never be. Calculated, as everything she did was calculated -- but, then, he understood that side of her because he was the same way himself. And he did respect her, even if he thought she sometimes allowed emotion to make her careless, deeply careless with her responsibilities and the lives that depended on her. One of his responsibilities had been to bring her and the other civilians back to Atlantis safely, and because he had failed, he owed her the truth. "No, you're right. There's a very real possibility that this is going to destabilize what's on top of you, maybe bring it down."

And so these might be her last seconds of life. He'd been in that position more than once; he knew how it felt. Generally it was different for civilians, but not so much in certain occupations. Police officer. Firefighter. Pegasus Galaxy diplomat. The only response from Elizabeth was a soft sigh, and she asked, "Is there anything I can do to, er ...?"

"Shore it up from underneath?" At her soft affirmative sound, he said, "I don't think so. I've asked the engineers, but it's not as if we can get them up here to take a look, and ... it's pretty much a mess. Can't tell where anything begins or ends."

There was a smile in her voice, but no bitterness, as she said, "So we cross our fingers and hope."

"That's about the size of it." At least she wasn't panicking, though in a way the eerie calmness was more difficult to take than if she'd been screaming and wailing against her fate.

"Sir?" Cadman, on the radio. "Are you ready?"

"We're ready, Lieutenant."

Elizabeth spoke in a soft, dreamy voice. She seemed to be drifting away again, and considering what might happen in the next few seconds, perhaps it was just as well. "Shouldn't you be, I don't know, taking cover somewhere?"

"We aren't that close to the door," Caldwell said, and his grip tightened -- because no one, no matter the personal difference that he had with them, deserved to die alone.

After all of that, the actual explosion turned out to be a bit of an anti-climax: with a WHOOMPH! not much louder than the muffled blasts they'd been hearing from other parts of the ship, the sealed bridge doors shifted inward as if from a giant's kick. "All clear -- could use some help over here!" Cadman yelled through the opening, and several of the bridge crew ran to assist in prying the doors back until there was enough of a gap to admit two medics -- including the CMO, Dr. Ling -- as well as Cadman's impromptu demolitions team.

"Very nice work, Lieutenant," Caldwell told her. Weir's hand had gone unresponsive in his own; he hoped it just meant she'd passed out again, since the debris had not seemed to shift, but there would be no way to know until they dug her out. He dug a finger into her wrist, located the flutter of a pulse, and only then straightened to return the Lieutenant's salute. "How's it going in the rest of the ship?"

"Pretty much done, sir." Cadman dragged a hand across her face, wiping away soot and sweat. Blond hair straggled limply down her forehead. "We've freed most of the trapped personnel -- there are just a few individuals in different parts of the ship that we still have to locate. We've been assembling people in the cargo bay, except for the wounded; we're generally leaving them where they are."

Caldwell glanced at Ling for confirmation of this. His CMO nodded. "We have no power to the sickbay; it's not as if we could do any more for them if we took them there. In a lot of cases, it's better not to try to move them." Drawing a deep breath, she added, "I have a few surgeries to perform. I needed to take a look at the situation up here first, but -- I'll be busy for a while, Colonel."

Surgeries ... without electricity or decent lights, with the temperature steadily creeping lower inside the ship. Caldwell didn't like those odds. "Do what you need to, Major."

Ling nodded briskly and turned to attend to the soldier whose leg had been severed -- they had made her as comfortable as possible, but the heavy metallic tang of blood overlaid even the dust and reek of cordite from the explosives. Caldwell went to give her hand a squeeze and offer her a few words of comfort, then moved among the bridge crew, a bit numbly. So many injured, and the rest of the crew were the same. Only five people were actually dead, according to the reports he'd gotten back from the different sections, but without adequate medical care, they might have more soon...

He finished his circuit to find Cadman, Kleinman and Perry deep in a discussion of how to dig out Weir, and he left them to it, stepping carefully through the half-open doors into a dark, silent hallway. He had a flashlight in his coveralls, but didn't bother with it -- he knew his ship well enough to walk its corridors blindfolded. But his ship was different now, the familiar corridors twisted and half-clogged with debris. After stumbling several times, and ripping his finger open on a jagged edge of metal, he had to stop and get out the flashlight to continue.

Changes. Never anything the same. He moved through the shell of his ship like a sleepwalker, feeling the growing chill in the air as they bled heat to the outside. Heat ... they'd need to do something about that. Food, they had in abundance -- they carried enough to feed the entire crew for a month, and if they hadn't come up with a way to contact Atlantis or Earth by that time, then they were all in a lot of trouble. Water ... they had some, but without life support, they would end up relying on snow for most of their --

"Colonel Caldwell? This is Novak."

"Caldwell here." He realized that he was wandering without purpose, and that wasn't good. Raising his hand to his forehead, he brought it away wet and sticky. Should probably have talked to Ling before leaving the bridge, but she'd been busy with people far more injured than himself.

"Hermiod would like to see you in the engine room, sir. Lt. Cadman says that the bridge doors have been opened."

"That's right. I'll be down shortly." He wiped his hand across his eyes, sweeping away blood. It had been less than an hour since the crash, according to his watch.

It felt like a year.

------

Impact plus 1 hour 4 minutes

The drugs hadn't taken away the pain -- the beast still crouched at the edge of his awareness, waiting to roar up and take him down again. The only difference the drugs had made was that now he didn't care. He lay still, because he was afraid to move, and gazed up at the bright bars of flashlight beams dancing in the smoke-filled air. They looked solid enough to reach out and touch. Half-formed phrases rose and submerged in the dark waters of his subconscious, words to describe the beauty of the roiling smoke and the wonder that sufficient particles in the air could make light visible. He felt a little poetic and a little drunk, and knew it was from the drugs, but again, he didn't care.

Something sank down next to him with a loud sigh. Rodney. He thought about turning his head, decided that it wasn't worth the risk of waking the beast.

"Radek?"

Of course, Rodney was never capable of simply leaving a person alone. When Zelenka ignored him, an insistent hand prodded at his uninjured shoulder until he gave up and mumbled, "Some of us are trying to sleep."

"In English, Radek," Rodney snapped in a voice that sounded strained and ragged.

Sometimes he couldn't tell. He tried to sort out the different languages in his brain. "Is this English now?"

"It must be, since I can understand you. Well, to the extent that I can ever parse what passes for coherent thoughts with you." The hand stayed on his shoulder. This worried him more than anything else so far. McKay was trying to be nice to him ... and that didn't bode well at all for the state of his health.

He moved his head at last, because he couldn't keep staring at the ceiling forever, and also because he wanted to see if Rodney was hurt -- consumed by his own pain, he hadn't even wondered, up until now, about the others here. Elizabeth Weir, Greta Estvaag -- no, Estvaag was dead, wasn't she ... he'd seen her die, her head erupting in a spray of blood in those crazy moments when everything went slow and he saw death coming to meet him with a tearing screech of metal.

He lowered his gaze from the ceiling to see Caldwell and Novak standing close together at the far side of the room, speaking to each other in low urgent tones. Sweeping his eyes slowly to the side, he saw that Rodney was watching them, the blue eyes half-lidded and focused far away. There was an ugly bruise down one side of McKay's face, along with smudges of soot and streaks of blood that didn't seem to be his own, and fine lines of stress surrounded his eyes in a way that Zelenka hadn't seen since the Wraith siege. At some point he'd managed to acquire a military-issue parka; it was unzipped and hung open.

"Rodney?" He wasn't sure if he'd spoken aloud, but he must've made some noise because Rodney's head turned towards him, the eyes coming back from wherever they'd gone. "What happened?"

"We crashed. You've asked me that before."

Everything was foggy. He couldn't get hold of his thoughts. "I know," he said, although he wasn't sure if he'd known or not.

Rodney sighed and leaned closer, speaking in a low murmur with his eyes on the people across the room. "We were sabotaged. And you'd better have your head screwed on straight enough not to go blathering about it to anybody else, you hear me? I know it wasn't one of us -- us Atlanteans, I mean -- but there's no telling who they might talk to. Don't know about Caldwell's people, wouldn't trust his grunts farther than I could throw them. It might not have been any of us. It's Wraith technology."

"Wraith?" Zelenka wondered if he'd heard right, or if his brains were even more scrambled than he'd thought.

"The hyperdrive's been sabotaged. Hermiod found a Wraith decoupler, similar to the ones they use in their drives to divert the --" He broke off, apparently remembering that he was talking to one of the few people in the galaxy who actually understood the difference between Wraith and Asgard drive technology. "Anyway, it shorted out our drive for a few seconds and dropped us out of hyperspace. It wouldn't have been a problem if we hadn't been passing through a star system at the time. What are the odds, hm?"

Zelenka tried to pull together his scattered thoughts. "Someone ... wanted the ship intact."

Rodney looked around and snorted. "Yeah, that plan backfired a tad, didn't it?"

Zelenka laughed a little, broke off with a wince. The hand tightened involuntarily on his shoulder. He pretended not to notice. "You think there are Wraith coming, Rodney?"

"I'll let the utter stupidity of that question pass, since you're drugged." McKay stared across the room at Caldwell and Novak, who had now been joined by Hermiod as well. "Of course they're coming. We know they want to get their hands on an Earth ship to study it. This is probably their latest attempt. We also found a transmitter which Hermiod's deactivated, hopefully in time. The big question is how they managed to sabotage the ship in the first place."

"Perhaps when Caldwell was --"

"Caldwell was a Goa'uld, Radek." While not entirely common knowledge on Atlantis, the story had become known among the various departments' upper echelons. "They're not working with the Wraith. At least, I hope they're not ... Besides, I know the SGC goes over these ships with a fine-toothed comb every time they're in port. Even the U.S. military couldn't be incompetent enough to miss something this obvious. This had to have been added after its last trip back to Earth ... which would tend to point to a saboteur on board."

"A Wraith on the ship," Radek whispered.

"Or a Wraith sympathizer, yes."

"Or someone who wants us to believe they are Wraith sympathizer."

From the brief, startled hesitation before Rodney spoke again, he hadn't even thought of that. "Well, yes, or it's a decoy, obviously. I'd dismissed the idea because I find it hard to believe that anyone on the Daedalus staff could have gotten their hands on functional Wraith technology."

Good comeback, except ... "Rodney, we could have -- on the planet with the crashed ship, where Brendan --" Zelenka broke off at the look on Rodney's face, resumed hastily: "The point is, galaxy is full of crashed and abandoned Wraith technology on various worlds. Daedalus people, Atlantis people, go back and forth all the time. Anyone could have picked something up on one of the worlds through the Stargate."

"Regardless of the possibility," Rodney said irritably, "it still brings us back to the idea that someone on the Daedalus caused the crash, for whatever reason. The possibility of a stowaway is remote, not on a ship with this many inboard sensors and so few places to hide. Hermiod would have to know about it, if nothing else." He paused. "It couldn't be Hermiod ...?"

Zelenka stared at him. "An Asgard? I am the one on drugs, Rodney, not you."

"Right." Rodney shook himself. "Although I find it hard to believe the Asgard are that advanced. They must have criminals among them. Their PR department just hides 'em when the Earth dignitaries come to visit. Where was I? Oh, right, saboteurs. Hiding. Or hiding in plain sight."

"The SGC screens its personnel very well, Rodney." The debate should have worn him out, but instead, he felt stronger. There was a rightness to arguing with Rodney. This was the way the universe was meant to work. "Obviously not perfectly, since you got through --"

"Oh har. In Sheppard's absence, I can see that you've decided to pick up the slack..."

"--but one of the crew, working with the Wraith? It is hard to imagine."

"Considering that Caldwell walked around for, what, months? as a Goa'uld, I wouldn't count on the acuity of the U.S. military to keep Wraith sympathizers out of their ranks," Rodney said dryly. "I'm thinking we trust no one on general principles -- I mean, except for our own people, obviously; though I admit that it's possible a Goa'uld might have --"

Rodney broke off as Dr. Ling approached them. He hastily withdrew his hand from Zelenka's shoulder, as if guilty to be caught in a moment of weakness, but stayed close.

Of all the crew on the Daedalus -- outside the engineering department, at least -- Carol Ling was the only one that Zelenka knew. He'd known her before Atlantis -- not well, but they'd had a passing acquaintance and had seen each other occasionally at conferences. She had a background in the hard sciences in addition to her medical degree. When he'd learned that she was now serving as the CMO on the Daedalus, he hadn't been in the least surprised.

Carol knelt down next to him and laid her hand on his leg. "How are you feeling, Radek? Any pain?"

"Maybe it would help if you alleged doctors would remove the giant fucking piece of metal from his chest."

"Rodney," Zelenka said, rolling his head to the side so he could look at both of them, "no one asked you. I am not feeling much pain, Carol, no."

"You're on a first-name basis with her?" Rodney asked, startled.

Zelenka decided to ignore that, although the only other thing he had to focus on was the sensation of light pressure as Ling probed gently at his shoulder. He couldn't see what she was doing, and he was just as glad.

"There is fairly significant bruising and trauma, but you don't seem to be bleeding much and it's not threatening any internal organs," she told him. "I'm sorry, Radek -- I'd love to get you free, but we just don't have the resources to do it right now without causing more damage. It will be a risk to move you, a significant one, and I'd rather not take that risk unless I absolutely have to in order to save your life." She looked at the piece of paper that Cora the medic had taped to the wall by his head -- it seemed to be what they were doing for the trauma cases in lieu of formal medication charts -- and, inserting a needle into his IV, she added, "I'm giving you a little more painkiller to make you more comfortable. I don't want to depress your body's metabolism too much because of the cold, though. You'll probably sleep a little, and that's good, but try to move your limbs every half-hour or so, and let someone know if you start to experience numbness." She turned to look at Rodney. "Are you his friend?"

Rodney looked startled. "Define 'friend'. Are we talking about the sort of friendship where you might admit in public that you know them, or do you mean 'donating a kidney' class friendship?"

Dr. Ling gave him one of the puzzled-annoyed looks that new people tended to give Rodney the first time he opened his mouth around them. "I mean the sort of friendship in which you stop by every once in a while and make sure he hasn't frozen his feet."

"Oh. That. Er, there's not going to be anything -- medical involved, is there? Because I'm not good with that."

"Yes, Carol," Zelenka said, drawing her attention back to him. "He is a friend. A very annoying one. And he will check on me. Difficult part will be making him leave."

"No one asked you, Radek," Rodney snapped.

Carol Ling looked back and forth between them, momentarily at a loss for words. She seemed to snap together, pull herself upright, and resume her usual businesslike manner. "All right then. Remember, tell someone immediately if you have any numbness or difficulty moving any part of your body other than the affected arm. I will be down here for a while -- I'll be operating on Sgt. Packee." She nodded towards the badly injured engineer, the other person besides Radek that they hadn't evacuated during the fire. One of the other medics was setting up lanterns and laying out a tray of tools on the slanting floor.

Rodney's voice rose in a squeak. "You're doing that here?"

"Because I have no choice. She's bleeding to death internally." Ling's mouth tightened. "Considering the circumstances and the present condition of the sickbay, I think the odds are marginally better if we don't try to transport critically injured people -- especially from here, where we'd have to do it through a ventilation shaft and then outside. We're treating the worst injuries where they are. If we get the power back up, it might be different ..."

As she stood up, Rodney realized that there was something he hadn't asked yet -- something important. "Elizabeth. Dr. Weir. Do you know if Elizabeth ..." Survived the crash, he was going to say, but faltered and fell silent. He was a rational man and knew that admitting a fear would not make it real. But he couldn't quite bring himself to articulate it. "Is she all right?"

Ling looked down at him grimly. "She's on the bridge. The roof caved in and she's trapped. She is injured, but we don't know how badly. She's conscious --"

Rodney was scrambling to his feet. "Why didn't anyone tell me?"

"They've been a little busy, Rodney," Zelenka said quietly. But he felt guilty, too. He hadn't even wondered where Elizabeth was -- or even how the rest of the ship had survived the crash.

Rodney glanced down at Zelenka, looking torn. "Radek --"

Zelenka snorted, managing to raise a hand, from under the blankets, to wave him off. "Please. It is not as if you could do anything to help here. Are you a surgeon? Go, get your medical degree and come back ... then you will be useful."

"Kindly remember not to freeze while I'm gone, Radek, because then you'll have to deal with these butchers amputating your limbs -- probably without anesthesia, too."

"I will remember." The new painkiller seemed to be taking effect, because the floating feeling had deepened, and his eyelids felt heavy. He allowed them to fall shut. Sleep might be good, right now.

"Radek?" The strained note was back in Rodney's voice. "You'll, ah, be here when I get back, right?"

He grinned a little, wanting to giggle and knowing it was the drugs. "I don't think it is possible for me to move, Rodney. I am nailed to wall."

"That's ... not what I meant."

Reluctantly, Radek blinked open his gritty eyes to see Rodney staring down at him with naked worry on his face. Worry which he'd probably deny to his deathbed, but it was clearly visible at the moment. "Yes, Rodney, I will be here." And, closing his eyes, he stopped holding on and let himself drift away.

------

Impact plus 1 hour 25 minutes

Each time she woke up, it was the same thing: first, confusion and disorientation, followed by panic as the darkness and sense of weight pressing down on her provided tangible reminders that she was buried alive. Slowly, then, she remembered where she was, and why -- and that there were people out there doing everything in their power to dig her free. With slow, shallow breaths, she calmed herself and made herself remember that since she could hear voices outside her tomb, there must be air getting in and out.

Elizabeth swore to herself that if -- when she got out of this, she'd never, ever make light of Rodney's claustrophobia, or any of his other phobias, ever again.

A hand touched her own: warm small fingers, not Caldwell's big rough ones. "Keisha?" Elizabeth asked. Even after the rescue effort had begun, the young woman had stayed with her, rubbing warmth into her cold flesh and talking softly to her.

"No, ma'am. I'm Cora Ludwick, and I'm a medic. I'll just be taking some readings from you."

Firm fingers gripped her wrist, counting off a pulse. From the sound of her voice, this Cora sounded as young as Keisha. Children, the world was in the hands of children ... and Elizabeth smiled to herself in the dark, amused to find herself having such thoughts at her age. She tried to match a face to the name, and vaguely remembered a serious, intense blond woman who had come to the bridge once to ask Caldwell a question. He'd addressed the young woman as Ludwick, she thought -- it was an unusual name, easy to remember.

Her instinct, in every new situation, was to try to learn as much about the people around her as possible -- and her gift was the ability to retain it, faces and names and personal details. It was one of the things that made her good at what she did. The Daedalus, though, was an ever-changing kaleidoscope of new faces and names. One of the reasons why she'd wanted to come along on this trip -- although she hadn't told Caldwell -- was to become better acquainted with the command crew of the Daedalus, including its captain. Since it seemed that they'd be working together for the foreseeable future, regardless of how either of them felt about it, she thought it was high time she started trying to learn what made the man tick. You learned a lot about a person by watching the behavior of those under their command ... especially in the military.

And despite her many personal differences with Caldwell, she liked what she had seen on the Daedalus. The ship was run with far tighter authority than Elizabeth would ever want to see on Atlantis -- and she did hope, still, that Caldwell never ended up in Sheppard's position, at least not while she was governor of the city -- but the people that she had met here were happy, content and busy. It was obvious that they respected Caldwell highly and wanted to please him. And he had a good eye for people; Airman Keisha Seavey was a good case in point, very young and shy at first glance, but made of solid stuff in a crisis.

"Dr. Weir?" She became aware of the medic talking to her, and realized that her mind had drifted. "I need you to answer some questions for me. Dr. Weir?"

She answered a few simple questions of the "what is your name, what day is it" variety, alarmed that the answers were sometimes difficult to find. It became even harder when they ventured into "where does it hurt" territory. It definitely did hurt somewhere, but Elizabeth couldn't figure out exactly where. Things seemed to grind together inside when she moved, so she had stopped moving and wasn't eager to begin again. There was a wet feeling in her chest when she inhaled. She couldn't really feel her legs at all, and this was the first time she'd noticed, which also alarmed her. She asked the medic if it was true that the worst wounds hurt the least.

"It depends on where and how you're hurt," Cora Ludwick said, unhelpfully. Like most of the military medical personnel that Elizabeth had dealt with, she had a brisk, no-nonsense manner that seemed to imply a person's medical problems were their own fault. Her fingers on Elizabeth's arm were not at all gentle, not like Keisha's.

Somewhere above Elizabeth, there was a grinding, shifting noise. Cora's firm grip withdrew from her wrist. Dust sifted down onto her face, and Elizabeth closed her eyes and struggled to control her breathing. They were digging her out as fast as they could safely do so, and beyond that, she simply had to trust in Caldwell and his crew -- that they wouldn't crush her, that they would rescue her before she suffocated or died of internal injuries.

You couldn't do everything yourself. She'd long known this. Sometimes you had to let go and allow other people to do their job.

"You idiots, what are you trying to do, crush her like a pancake?"

... and then there was Rodney, the ultimate control freak. Elizabeth couldn't help smiling at the sound of his voice. Caldwell had told her that one of her people had been killed -- Dr. Estvaag, and she'd been, in part, passing the time by mentally composing her letter to Estvaag's family. But the rest were ... well, Caldwell hadn't actually said all right, but ... not dead. And that had been good to know.

Hearing Rodney's voice, though, sounding just like it did when he was berating somebody back in his labs on Atlantis, eased something inside her chest that had nothing to do with whatever was broken down there.

"Dr. McKay, everything is under control here." She recognized the weary-sounding voice of Caldwell's second-in-command, Perry.

"Excuse me, I don't think so! She's under that, isn't she? Elizabeth's under that! And your fumble-fingered morons are throwing chunks of metal around like frisbees without a single regard for the physical stresses that the overall --"

"Dr. McKay," Perry cut in smoothly, and Elizabeth's grin grew a little wider, imagining the look on Rodney's face as he sputtered to a stop. "You're not in charge here. Please stop criticizing my staff's performance or I will have you escorted from the bridge."

Rodney made a faint choking noise and then, "Excuse me?!"

Elizabeth decided that, as entertaining as this was, she'd better intercede before Rodney burst a blood vessel or Perry shot him. "Rodney," she said as loudly as she could, which wasn't very loud.

From the response, though, she may as well have shouted. Elizabeth listened nervously to the rapid flurry of scrambling and sliding, hoping that he didn't accidentally bring the pile down on top of her with his eagerness to get around it. There was a grunt and an annoyed exclamation as someone was obviously shoved out of the way, and then a hand touched hers. Large, warm, moist and awkward, it could only belong to one Rodney McKay, and she knew it even before he said her name softly: "Elizabeth?"

"Rodney, please stop bothering Caldwell's crew. They're trying to dig me out." She curled her fingers up around his. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine, actually. For a wonder." He tried to make it sound light, but his voice broke in the middle.

"Caldwell told me ... about Dr. Estvaag. Greta. I'm sorry, Rodney." She knew how seriously he took his responsibility to his scientists. He yelled at them, belittled them, ignored them and occasionally left the more sensitive ones in tears -- but when one of them didn't make it home at the end of the day, no one felt it more deeply than Rodney.

"Yeah. Me too." His fingers returned her pressure, a little less tentative, a little more confident.

"How are the rest of them?"

"Scared. Shaken up. Useless. About like you'd expect." His hand twitched as he talked -- clearly he was gesturing with the other hand, while the one holding hers was moving instinctively. Elizabeth felt herself smiling again, but it dropped away as his voice faltered and his words came slower. "There are ... injuries. Dr. Pierce has a twisted ankle. Miko got burned and cut up her arm pretty bad on shrapnel. Zelenka ... he's ... pretty bad, Elizabeth."

"How bad?" she asked quietly. It was a little harder to talk now, and there was a coppery taste on the back of her tongue.

"Bad." His restless fingers stilled, and gripped hers tighter, as if holding onto a lifeline.

She wanted to ask, wanted to know more ... but told herself it didn't matter, that it wasn't as if she could help Zelenka or comfort him, wasn't as if knowing the extent of his injuries would do any good for either of them. And she could feel Rodney's fingers trembling slightly in her own. So she held his hand, and he held hers, and she felt herself slip away as if she'd come untethered from the world, to the sound of groaning metal above her and Rodney speaking her name.

------

Impact plus 2 hours 5 minutes

They'd sent a MALP through the gate, and found it to be a spacegate, orbiting a world that showed no sign of current inhabitants, only faint traces of overgrown roads and long-ruined cities. At any other time, Atlantis's scientists would have been drooling over the possibilities of the millennia-old ruins, but right now the idea of exploring a strange planet was the last thing on everyone's mind. The ruins would wait. Their friends and colleagues might not.

The Daedalus's emergency beacon came from a different planet in the system, much farther from the sun. Repeated attempts to raise the ship had not received any response. The beacon continued to transmit, although the Wraith distress call had shut off. That could be good or bad, Sheppard thought.

"We've been able to use the two beacons to get an estimate on the Daedalus's position." A short, energetic Polish scientist, whose name Sheppard remembered as something like Wladyslav, demonstrated on the display screen at the head of the conference table. "Unfortunately it's a long flight by puddlejumper from the gate to the planet where we believe the Daedalus has crashed ... which also seems to be the planet where we were getting the Wraith signal from."

"How long is long?"

Wladyslav frowned. "Twenty hours, give or take. Which means it'll be nearly a two-day round trip. We can't assume that the planet has a breathable atmosphere, so we'd better be prepared for the possibility that we won't be able to replenish anything on the other end."

"Can the life support on the puddlejumpers handle that kind of trip?" Sheppard asked.

There was a brief pause. The foremost expert on the jumpers was Zelenka, who, obviously, wasn't there. After a moment Simpson spoke. "I don't see why not. It would limit how many people you could carry in the jumper, though."

"How limited?"

"I'll need to run some numbers," she admitted.

"Do it," Sheppard said. "We're going to need enough jumpers to carry everyone on the Daedalus in one trip, if that's possible. It might not be comfortable, but I want to know if we can do it."

There was a short pause and then Lorne spoke. "Sir, can I point something out?"

"Go ahead, Major."

Lorne cleared his throat. "I'll be blunt here. There may be Wraith in that system, sir."

"It's possible," Sheppard said.

The major hesitated again. "Sir, I'm not sure it's advisable to send most or all of our jumpers on a two-day trip when we have no ready means of escape and don't know what's out there. I know it's not something we want to contemplate, but if the Wraith turn up, it's a real possibility that we may lose at least some of them on this trip. We still don't know what took down the Daedalus."

"We can't leave our people there, Lorne."

"I'm not saying we should, sir. But I don't know how wise it is to risk our entire puddlejumper fleet on a rescue when we don't ... I'm sorry, sir, when we don't know if there is anyone to rescue."

There was an awkward silence. Sheppard had to look away from Beckett and Teyla's sympathetic eyes. Elizabeth should be here. She should be making this decision. At this moment, she would be counseling the course of prudence -- he could almost hear her -- and he'd be pressing to take out all the jumpers in a rescue effort. They would go back and forth, and somewhere in the middle they'd find the compromise that would work and bring everyone safely home.

It was impossibly hard, arguing both sides to himself. He knew that Lorne was right. They had no idea if anyone was alive on the Daedalus, no idea if the Wraith beacon had already brought a Wraith fleet down upon it. It would be foolhardy and stupid to risk all the puddlejumpers on a rescue, maybe leaving Atlantis wide open to future Wraith attacks and lacking a tremendous strategic advantage if they couldn't send jumpers through the gate.

At the same time, there were people out there, maybe hurt, maybe dying. People he cared about. Rodney. Elizabeth. What if they got there with one or two jumpers and found everyone on the Daedalus critically injured? What if he had to choose between people he cared for, more than he'd ever cared for human beings before -- this one stays and dies, this one goes and lives?

How could you make a decision like that? How did Elizabeth do it?

Sheppard took a deep breath and clenched his hands into fists. "We'll take some of the jumpers," he said. "Half of them, maybe. Simpson, I'm still going to need those calculations. I need to know how many people I can carry in each jumper. And I'm going to need pilots."

"You can count on me for that, sir," Lorne said without hesitation, and then, after the briefest pause, "I don't know if I should have --"

"You should have, Major. I'm glad you did." Sheppard's eyes swung around to Beckett. "I'm going to need medical staff --"

"Ready to go in fifteen minutes," Beckett said. "And I am going, Colonel; you can't keep me here. Just don't make me fly one of the bloody things."

Despite the urgency of their situation, Sheppard felt a slight grin twitch at his mouth. "Wouldn't dream of it, Doc."

"Colonel." Teyla's voice was soft, but tense. "Ronon and I would like to come."

No, Sheppard's brain screamed at him. It was bad enough that two of the most important people in his life were in danger, maybe injured or dead. Putting the rest of them into danger too -- he didn't think he could handle that. Still, he swallowed back emotion and tried to make the most sensible decision, tried to convince himself that he was making his choices for the good of Atlantis and not because it was what he wanted. "Teyla, I'm sorry. I need you to stay here. With the entire command staff gone, I'm going to leave Atlantis in your hands. I don't have a choice. I know how much you want to go, but I need you more here."

He could see the bitter disappointment in her eyes, but also acceptance.

"You're welcome to try to make me stay, Sheppard," Ronon rumbled.

"Wasn't planning on it, big guy. You and Beckett are my team this time. Lorne, I want -- let's see, how about five jumpers for the first wave? If it goes smoothly, we can send more. I'll take one, Lorne, and you've got another. I need you to put together three more crews, in addition to your own. One pilot, one additional Marine plus a medic on each team. Beckett chooses the medics, you choose the rest. Oh, Simpson ... I want one scientist, too, in my jumper. Just in case. Somebody with an engineering specialty. And I want volunteers only, you got it? They need to know it could be dangerous. We rendezvous in the jumper bay in half an hour."

They all nodded, and the meeting broke up. Sheppard was the last to leave the room, and outside he found Teyla waiting for him, looking expectant. "We'll have to talk and walk," he told her.

"I know." She strode swiftly, keeping up with him. "I wanted to tell you that I believe you are doing an excellent job, especially considering ... circumstances. I think you are a good leader, John."

For some reason he couldn't name, that meant more to him than he would have guessed. Maybe his emotions were just on edge right now, because it took him a moment to be able to answer. "Thanks, Teyla. Really. Thanks." After a pause he said, "I'm sorry about asking you to stay behind. I know how much you want to come. Believe me, I know. But I need you here." And this was true in more ways than one -- he just couldn't lie to himself. Knowing that at least one member of his small Atlantis family would remain safe helped him hold it together for the rest of them.

She smiled at him. "I know, and I understand. It is the right decision, however difficult it is for me to accept." Taking hold of his arm, she halted him, and gripped his shoulders to do that Athosian head-bob-thing with him. It was all Sheppard could do not to fidget in his impatience, but he made himself stand still, for Teyla's sake. When she drew her head back, he was startled to see tears standing in her deep brown eyes. She smiled at him, a bit shakily, and the tears came free to leave shining trails down her cheeks.

"Bring them back safely, John," she said in a voice so soft it could barely be heard. "Please bring them home safe."

------

Impact plus 2 hours 20 minutes

As frustrating as Rodney found the snail's pace of Elizabeth's rescue, he had to admit that they couldn't exactly do it faster. It was like the old game of pickup-sticks that he and his sister used to play when they were very young -- throw down a handful of sticks and try to remove each one without causing any of the other sticks to move. In this game, the cost of a wrong move would not be a lost turn, but the loss of Elizabeth's life.

He could feel the cold creeping into the ship. For the moment, it was just a chilly sensation around the edges -- he couldn't see his breath, could still feel his hands and feet. He found his brain automatically calculating square meters and thermal transfer, trying to figure out how long it would be before the inside of the ship was as icy and still as the world outside.

There were more than enough hands to move pieces of fractured plastic and twisted steel; he only felt in the way here. No one noticed as he left in uncharacteristic silence and wandered down to the cargo bay.

It was a very strange position in which to find himself. If this had been Atlantis, he would have been right in the thick of things, assessing and repairing damage. But right now, Hermiod wouldn't let him, or any of the rest of the crew, anywhere near the ship's systems -- not even Novak. Rodney suspected that the Asgard didn't really trust any of the humans at the moment. He, Novak and Caldwell were the only people who had been let in on the sabotage secret at all ... well, the three of them plus anyone else they'd told, such as Zelenka and, Rodney was pretty sure, Caldwell's second-in-command. And while Hermiod obviously trusted him that far, he still wasn't allowed near the engines.

So here he was, sharpest brain in the Pegasus Galaxy, fetching and carrying for people with IQs half as high as his own. And he couldn't even get one of the so-called medics to give him a Tylenol. He tried again in the cargo bay, accosting Radek's little doctor friend, Ling, as she hurried past. "Excuse me, I'm in a lot of pain here and if you could just tell me --"

"Where are you hurt?" she demanded, all but tapping her foot impatiently. Her sleeves and hands were stained with something dark that Rodney really, really hoped was engine oil. He tried not to touch her, instead pointing at the approximate location of the bruises on his arms and legs.

"Well, here, here, also here ... and I think I may have strained my back --"

She gave him a glare of vicious dislike. "You're as healthy as I am, and there are people with actual injuries who need my attention, so kindly get out of my way."

"Look, just tell me where it is and I'll get it mys-- Hey!" She'd dumped a couple of plastic cases into his arms. "What's this?"

"Medical equipment. If you're healthy enough to complain, you can help me carry it." She was giving him that look again -- like he was something that had crawled out from under a rock. "Have you been checking on your friend, like I told you to?"

"Excuse me, I'm not following your orders -- I volunteered if you'll recall -- get back here!" She was in motion again, and he had to hasten after her, threading between pallets and cots on the side of the cargo bay that had been turned into a makeshift infirmary.

"In other words, you haven't checked on him."

"I -- I was busy! Helping dig out people! Or -- watching -- supervising -- they'll get it wrong if I don't -- Listen, dammit, all I wanted was a Tylenol, okay? I'm in pain!" And writhing, inwardly, at the thought that he'd gotten too caught up in Elizabeth's peril to even think about Radek's. But the idea of having to see Zelenka again, pale and trapped and covered in his own blood -- he didn't know if he could take that again.

Ling spun around and Rodney recoiled guiltily, as if she could read his thoughts. Though much shorter than he was, she glared up at him with a force of anger that could rival Ronon on his worst days. "You know what? In the entire time you've been on this ship, the only thing I've ever heard you do is complain. You're one of the lucky ones who made it through the crash with a handful of bruises, while others are badly injured -- including someone who claims you're his friend. And you want painkillers." Her dark eyes raked over him. "I see you've got a coat too, when we only have a few. What makes you so important, Dr. McKay?"

Anger -- his standard defense against guilt. "Important? Excuse me? I'm only the person who's saved Atlantis from the Wraith -- how many times now? Do you have any idea who you're talking to? Do you know how many degrees I have?"

"I don't care how many degrees you have -- all I've seen you do since we crashed is stand around and try to tell everyone else what to do, in between whining about your bruises." She snatched back the plastic cases from him. "Thank you very much for the help. Now kindly stay out of my way. I'll find your Tylenol when I can spare the time." Turning her back on him, she knelt down beside a semiconscious man with his leg twisted at an odd angle, and laid her hand gently on the heaving chest, ignoring Rodney.

He wanted to yell at her. He wanted to find the anger again. But instead, it was draining away, leaving him feeling small and cowardly and pathetic.

"So, I'm just gonna go -- check on Radek," he said to her back, and fled.

Outside, twilight was deepening around the bulk of the ship. Rodney gathered the coat around him -- damn the woman, now he even felt guilty for that. He slid and floundered in the loose snow around the ship's hull.

"Dr. McKay!"

The voice came from behind him. Rodney looked around, confused and annoyed, until he caught sight of a tall figure in a parka slogging up the hill towards him. The hood was down and short pale hair whipped in the wind. It was the blond engineer -- what had his name been?

"Armstrong?" Rodney guessed, and then he noticed that the man was carrying a gun. He tried to recoil, but Armstrong closed the distance between them and grabbed him by the arm, tugging him around. What the hell was this -- an abduction? Wraith saboteur! his subconscious shrieked at him. Oh God, they were kidnapping him for his brain -- Rodney yanked his arm free with a panicked shout of "Hey!"

"Huh? Oh, sorry, Doc." Armstrong saw the way Rodney was staring at the gun and holstered it, but kept his hand near it. "Just trying to get you inside. It's not safe out here. I've been taking a look around, and the ship appears to be attracting predators."

He couldn't believe it -- the situation had actually managed to get worse. "Like ... what? Wolves?"

"Wolves that are about twelve feet long," Armstrong said grimly. "Which way are you headed?"

"Engine room. Er, have you actually seen these, uh, mega-wolves?"

"I saw their tracks. Seems to be a whole pack of them around." As he spoke, Armstrong shepherded Rodney towards the ventilation shaft leading into the engine room. His hand never left the butt of his pistol. "I caught a glimpse of one -- huge ugly sucker, kind of like a cross between a wolf and a reptile. Spikes on its neck, claws the size of a bear's --"

SCREEEEEK!

The sudden, shrill screech nearly made Rodney jump out of his skin. He spun around, searching for the source of the sound. A loose piece of metal on the ship somewhere?

"... and they shriek too," Armstrong said, giving him a light shove towards the shaft.

"You've been out here with those things?" Rodney yelled as he scrambled wildly inside. "Are you crazy?"

"That wasn't very close. The sound carries a long distance." Armstrong climbed in behind him. "I think they're afraid to approach the ship. I don't know how long that'll be the case, though. Luckily we have guns. I suggest you start carrying one too, Doc."

"Gladly," Rodney muttered. With saboteurs running around, and now giant shrieking wolves, he'd been deeply regretting having to give up his Atlantis-issue sidearm while on the Daedalus. Next time he saw Caldwell, he was definitely getting a gun. A big gun. Maybe a P90. Maybe two of them.

Rodney dropped out on the slanting floor. After the bitter chill outside, it actually felt warm in here. But, then, the engine room had had a lot more heat to lose in the first place. The room was nearly deserted: basically Hermiod's fault, the Asgard having kicked out all the engineers. (And Rodney still maintained that this was a stupid idea; they couldn't all be saboteurs.) Glancing around, he spotted Hermiod half-visible behind an open panel in the wall, while Novak, her arm splinted, guarded him or handed him tools or something. Teacher's pet, Rodney thought resentfully.

Sgt. Packee, the wounded engineer, was invisible behind a sheet the medics had hung across the room for privacy. Light behind the sheet cast wavering shadows across it as people moved around and did ... things Rodney probably didn't want to know about. Instead he crossed the sloping floor to Zelenka, huddled in a nest of blankets. Okay. Check to see that he wasn't freezing. Sounded easier said than done. One of Zelenka's feet was sticking out from under the blankets; Rodney poked at it with a cautious finger.

The foot twitched and Radek grumbled sleepily, "Rodney, I am not casserole. Stop checking to see if I am done."

Rodney jerked his hand back guiltily. "Look, don't blame me. I'm just trying to keep Terrible Tessa the sickbay harridan from ripping my head off if you freeze your limbs on my watch."

Zelenka squinted at him, looking bleary. "Are you talking about Carol? What did you do to annoy her, Rodney?"

"Hey! What makes you think it was me?"

Zelenka just snorted and closed his eyes.

"Oh, that's a stupid way to win an argument, Radek. As if I'm letting you get away with that. You know you can't out-argue me and this is a pathetically transparent attempt to avoid a debate you're well aware you can't help but lose because you haven't got the brains for it. Er ... Radek?" Getting no response, Rodney began tentatively patting at his face until Zelenka opened his eyes and glowered at him.

"Rodney, you are worse than my grandmother's cat. What are you doing?"

"You're cold," Rodney said, too worried to even be annoyed.

"It is cold in here."

"No ... no it's not, Radek. It's actually kind of warm, and you're wrapped in enough blankets to insulate Frosty the Snowman in July, which means you're probably in shock, which means ... oh, God."

"If you hyperventilate, Rodney, I do not think the Daedalus stocks paper bags, which means I will have to call one of the very large soldiers to throw you into a snowbank to calm you down." Studying Rodney from slightly glazed blue eyes, he asked, "How are you doing, anyway?"

That was a great question, coming from someone with a piece of metal sticking out of his chest. "Oh, I'm fine, Radek. No one will give me any Tylenol and I just found out there are apocalyptically huge, shrieking wolves outside."

"Shrieking wolves?"

"Yeah, it's a treat." Rodney settled down against the wall next to the other scientist. "Some of Caldwell's people have been scouting around outside, it seems ... antagonizing the local wildlife. By the way, Lt. Armstrong is my current suspect for saboteur."

"You mean Dennis? Why?"

Rodney shot him a disbelieving look. "Are you on a first-name basis with every person on this ship?"

"Unlike you, I actually take the time to get to know my co-workers as individuals rather than as potentially useful brains with a body wrapped around them." Radek shifted a little against the wall, apparently trying to find a more comfortable position; he winced and relaxed back into his original slumped pose. "And you did not answer my question. Why do you think Dennis is the saboteur?"

"Because he's friendly," Rodney said promptly. "Too friendly. People who act friendly for no reason are evil. Just look at the Genii."

"Kolya did not seem particularly friendly."

Rodney rolled his eyes. "Well, obviously they're evil if they act evil from the beginning, Radek; use your head."

"So, let me see if this is straight. If they're friendly, they're up to no good, and if they aren't friendly, they're also up to no good."

"Exactly," Rodney said, satisfied that Zelenka seemed to be following his reasoning.

"I can see why you did not become homicide detective, Rodney."

"Oh, for crying out -- Look, Radek, people don't act friendly just because they're, well ..."

"Friendly?"

"Exactly! There is no such thing as a truly nice person. Everyone wants something. If they act nice when they first meet you, that just means that they're willing to lie to get what they want. Which means they're clearly up to something." Rodney sat back and folded his arms, pleased with himself.

Radek just stared at him. "The inside of your head must be a dark and scary place, Rodney," he said, and closed his eyes again.

"Hey!" Rodney leaned forward. "Wake up! I don't think you should be sleeping."

Without opening his eyes, Zelenka retorted, "That is for concussion, Rodney, not for spike through chest. I would honestly rather sleep through this, thanks very much."

"I know that, but --" Rodney floundered to a halt; he didn't have a good reason except that Elizabeth wasn't much of a conversationalist at the moment and he felt terribly, horribly alone. "We were talking about sabotage theories," he said lamely.

"And if you come up with one that makes sense, be sure and let me know," Radek mumbled, and then added something in Czech, switching on the fly in a way that made Rodney suspect he didn't know he'd switched languages.

"Yeah, well ... don't die or anything." Rodney patted him awkwardly on the ankle, reminded yet again that as far as comforting bedside manner, the illustrious Dr. McKay ranked somewhere between Josef Mengele and Attila the Hun.

There was a small flurry of snowflakes at the far end of the room and he saw Armstrong giving a helping hand to someone coming through the ventilation shaft. It was the young blond medic -- Cora Whatsername. She'd just been outside, wearing nothing but a jacket with a Daedalus patch, and he could see her shivering from here. Snow crusted her pants and lightly dusted her hair ... short, blond, Sam Carter hair.

Rodney closed his eyes for an instant, then got up. "Hey, you, ah -- Cora?"

She looked up at him with the same tired, hostile look that he'd been getting from all the medical staff -- the word about him appeared to have spread. Rodney gritted his teeth and hoped that he would get some major karma points for this, as he shrugged out of the parka and realized that it was, indeed, chillier in the engine room than he'd realized. He thrust it at her as if it contained live coals. "Here. Take this. I'm really too hot, I'm naturally very warm-blooded so I don't need this, and you keep going outside and -- fixing people, and stuff. Also, you gave Radek drugs, although not very good drugs. Speaking of drugs, do you have any Tylenol?"

She blinked at him, trying to parse this, and took the coat without losing the puzzled line between her eyebrows. "Er ... thanks. Dr. McKay, was it?"

"Rodney." He smiled hopefully.

"Dr. McKay, yes ..." She dug in her pockets, while he drooped a little, only to perk up when she came up with several plastic packets and held them out. "Here, take two of these every four hours."

"I could kiss you," Rodney told her, and at her horrified look, added hastily, "But of course I won't. Unless you want me to. Which clearly you don't. Er, thanks."

"You're welcome. Thank you for the coat." She gave him a final puzzled look, and disappeared behind the curtain, while Rodney mentally kicked himself a few hundred times. Well, hopefully she would remember that he'd given her the coat, not that he was an idiot with a terminal case of foot-in-mouth disease. And she had given him Tylenol, which meant that she couldn't hate him too much.

On the other hand, she'd given him Tylenol ... which meant that according to the Nice Guy theory of villain detection, she was in the running for the Saboteur-of-the-Year award.

The whole thing made his head hurt, even more than it already hurt. Wasn't being trapped on an ice planet bad enough, without having to look over his shoulder constantly for a traitor? Why couldn't any sort of life-threatening situation ever be simple?

If hallucinations of Sam Carter showed up this time, he was throwing himself to the wolves.

------

Impact plus 2 hours 45 minutes

It had been more than fifteen minutes, but still, Sheppard was impressed by how quickly they'd managed to pull together five rescue teams and equipment on such short notice.

"There are over two hundred people on the Daedalus, counting the scientists," Simpson said as she slid into the seat next to Ronon on Jumper One. Since Sheppard had requested a scientist on the search-and-rescue, she'd insisted on being the one -- and since she was currently the ranking scientist on Atlantis, there wasn't anybody around to overrule her. Sheppard could have -- and he actually thought about it; he hated the idea of Atlantis's entire contingent of senior scientists being stranded in a potentially Wraith-infested solar system -- but in the end decided that it was her choice to make. Besides, she was second only to Zelenka at understanding the jumpers' systems, which would be good if they had to make changes on the fly.

"Two hundred people..." Sheppard prompted her when she trailed off and lost herself in the calculations she was scribbling quickly on a pad of paper on her knee. The Colonel was helping Beckett run down a checklist of medical equipment in the back of the jumper.

"What? Oh ... yes. I'm thinking we can carry anywhere from twelve to fifteen people in the jumper for a trip of that duration. Maybe fewer, if some of them are badly wounded and have to lie flat with room for medical personnel to work on them. It's not going to be comfortable, but we can make it work."

"Twelve to fifteen?" Sheppard repeated, swinging into the pilot's seat while Beckett, very reluctantly, took the copilot position. "That's it? A Black Hawk can take twenty passengers in an emergency, if not more, and the engines on this thing are much more powerful--"

"Yes, but a helicopter doesn't have life support." Simpson shook a piece of paper at him. "The last thing we want is to overwhelm the scrubbers and choke on CO2 ten hours from the gate."

"Point taken." Sheppard shook his head, running his fingers quickly over the controls as he went through his mental preflight checklist. "That means we can only evacuate, best-case scenario, about a third of the Daedalus's crew on the first trip. Let's hope they're in a position where the rest of them can hold out for the next wave of jumpers."

He'd instructed Teyla to prepare another batch of rescue jumpers and wait for his signal. If they made it to the planet without encountering Wraith, she was to send them through, so that the remaining Daedalus crew members wouldn't have to wait through a full round trip for the next wave of evacuations.

This was assuming there was anyone to be evacuated. And he wouldn't allow himself to believe differently. He tapped his radio. "Colonel Sheppard here. Are we a go?" Four voices came back with affirmation, and he cast a glance at his current team -- Beckett looking nervous, Simpson distracted, Ronon ready as always.

"Teyla, we're good. Dial the gate."

After a pause, her clear voice spoke through the radio. "We are ready, Colonel."

Sheppard started the launch sequence, and the jumper rose into the air. "Remember, Teyla, dial in and check with us every two hours."

"We will do so."

The jumper bay door irised open and, as the automatic launch protocols lowered them in front of the shimmering blue surface of the gate, Sheppard looked up at the balcony where Teyla stood, her hands locked on the railing. She looked small and alone. One of her hands unclenched and raised in a small wave. He waved back, though he wasn't sure if she could see him.

"May the Ancestors go with you, Colonel."

At any other time, Sheppard might have smiled at the quaint Athosian farewell. Now, he only pressed his lips together grimly and stared ahead as the jumper nosed through the gate. If only the Ancients were actually willing to help, rather than sitting on their Ascended asses and watching the mortals of the universe live out their short and frantic lives. No miracles, no salvation, at least not in this life -- the only thing they could rely on was their own wits, and each other.

The gate spit them out into a starfield, and he felt the controls come alive under his hands as the launch protocols released them. Bringing the jumper around in a circle, he watched the rest of his squad assemble in front of the gate, which disengaged with a burst of light and left them alone in orbit around a strange world. He took a minute to pinpoint the position of the MALP, tumbling slowly through space. They'd need to retrieve it at some point -- MALPs didn't grow on trees, unfortunately -- but not today.

"It doesn't look like there are any energy readings whatsoever from the planet, Colonel," Simpson reported. "Looks like the MALP data was right -- this solar system's dead. On the bright side, there's no sign of Wraith at this point, either."

Dead. Not a good choice of words. "Lorne? Everyone ready to roll?"

"Ready down here, sir."

"Moving out then. Follow me, and stay in touch."

He came around again, laying in the heading that Simpson had given him. Twenty hours waited in front of them, twenty long and tense hours, unless they could reach the Daedalus at some point during the flight. Boosting his radio with the jumper's communication system, he gave it a try. "Daedalus, this is Colonel Sheppard. Do you read me?"

He repeated the call several times, on several channels. There was no response. "Okay, Daedalus, I'm assuming your communications are down, but just in case, here's the situation. This is Sheppard and I'm inbound towards your position with